LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

(hap. Copyright No. 

Shelf. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 



TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 



BY 

CHARLES H. PARKHURST 







NEW YORK 

Ube Century Go. 

1897 



n* 



%* 



t,,i 






Copyright, 1896, by 

The Curtis Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1897, by 

The Century Co. 



The DeVinnf Press. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Stuff that Makes Young Manhood . . i 

The Body the Foundation of the Man . . 13 

The Young Man Entering Life 24 

Shall we Send our Boy to College? ... 35 

Substitutes for a College Training ... 46 

A Young Man's Religious Life ..... 58 

Selecting a Career 70 

The Young Man as a Citizen 81 

The Young Man at Play 93 

The Young Man and Marriage ..... 104 
The Young Man on the Fence . . , . ,115 



TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 




TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 



THE STUFF THAT MAKES 
YOUNG MANHOOD 

THE most important thing a young man ever 
does is to get ready. The key-note lasts to 
the end of the tune, and the foundation reaches 
clear to the finial. Beginnings are autocratic. 
No matter how long a man lives, he will never 
get away from his youth. My initial inquiry, 
therefore, will concern itself with the matter of 
stuff. What is in a man at the commencement 
has almost as much to say as to what he will 
finish with as the chestnut has to say about the 
kind of tree that will grow out of it. There is 
1 i 



good authority for the fact that thistles do not 
evolve figs. Every live kernel, whether botani- 
cal or human, is stamped with its destiny. An 
acorn can never grow into anything but an 
oak. I shall have considerable to say before I 
am through about a young man's power to shape 
his own future. It is all the more necessary to 
begin, therefore, by understanding that that is 
true only within limits. It has ceased to be a 
current theory that every mother's boy is liable 
to become President of the United States. All 
men are not run in the same mold, and a man is 
handicapped by his mold. It is not likely that 
Colonel Smith could have become Napoleon, 
even if he had lived south of the Channel in the 
days of the French Revolution. There is a qual- 
ity in some men that is in them before they begin 
to do anything, and that cannot be earned by 
perspiration. Putting a buttercup to school will 
not graduate it a butterfly, even if it is a very 
good school. Its only wholesome ambition will 
be to be as good as it can as a buttercup. Born 
differences are incorrigible and are a good deal 
in the nature of fate. 



# 
# # 



MY intention in emphasizing stuff is to dis- 
credit the stress that is in so many quarters 
laid on circumstance. A good many young men 



excuse themselves from ever becoming anything 
or doing anything by the fact that they always 
live where it is low tide. Perhaps that is because 
it is always low tide where they live. At any 
rate, the more I learn of the history of the men 
who have succeeded the more apparent it be- 
comes that if they were born in low water they 
patched up their tattered circumstances and beat 
out to sea on a tide of their own making. Dr. 
Roswell D. Hitchcock once wrote : " How many 
1 mute, inglorious Miltons ' die in their mothers' 
arms nobody knows ; but the grown-up Miltons 
all get heard from." I have watched a good 
many brooding hens, but I never saw one facili- 
tate the hatching process by pecking the shell. 
The chick on the inside will get out if he is worth 
it. Circumstances are only remotely related to 
the marrow of the matter. Success means, all the 
way through to the finish, a victory over difficul- 
ties, and if the young aspirant lacks the grit to 
face and down the difficulty that happens to con- 
front him at the start, there is little reason to 
expect that his valor will show to any better ad- 
vantage in his encounter with enemies that get in 
his way later. Thirty years ago if a young man 
made up his mind to go to college the first ques- 
tion he asked of himself was, " How can I earn 
the money? " The first question he is likely to 
ask himself to-day is, " Whom can I look to to 



give me the money? " Removing difficulties is 
often nothing more nor less than putting a pre- 
mium on incompetency. More men are injured 
by having things made easy for them than by 
having their path beset with difficulties, for it 
encourages them to stay themselves on circum- 
stances, whereas their supreme reliance needs to 
be on their own personal stuff. We therefore 
rarely expect that the son of a successful man 
will be himself a success. Abraham's son was 
nothing but Isaac, hardly more than a hyphen to 
connect Abraham with Jacob. It is a big mistake 
to have too great a father. Sir William Grove 
says: "An estate in Somersetshire, of which I 
once took charge temporarily, was on the slope 
of the Mendip Hills. The rabbits on one part 
of it, viz., that on the hillside, were in perfect 
condition, not too fat nor too thin, sleek, active, 
vigorous, and yielding excellent food. Those in 
the valley, where the pasturage was rich and 
luxuriant, were all diseased, most of them unfit 
for human food, and many lying dead on the 
fields. They had not had to struggle for life ; 
their short life was miserable and their death 
early." Which is as true of boys as of rabbits. 
We are more likely to find a good destiny by 
going afoot than by riding. 



# # 



THE personal stuff just mentioned is primarily 
composed of two factors — intelligence and 
passion, the power to know a thing and the power 
to feel it. The degree to which these two possi- 
bilities are combinedly developed will measure 
pretty accurately the reach of their possessor's 
effectiveness and influence. Whatever contrib- 
utes to that result is education in the best and 
broadest sense of the term. This is the only 
thorough way of approaching the educational 
problem. I am assuming in all this that the 
young man whom I am addressing is disposed to 
take matters seriously, and that nothing contents 
him short of the reality in the case. I come back 
to it again, then, that his own personality, trained 
in the two mentioned directions of thought and 
feeling, is certain to constitute the capital with 
which he is to make himself a personal factor 
in the world's life. Young men are constantly 
worrying lest they be failures and nonentities. 
Every man will count for all he is worth. There 
is as steady and constant a ratio between what a 
man is and what he can accomplish as there is 
between what a ton of dynamite is and what it 
can accomplish. There is as much a science of 
success as there is a science of hydraulics. And 
it all comes back in the first instance to the matter 
of laying in supplies, accumulating primary stuff. 

A lad is never too young to have that fact put 
1* 



before him, and never too old to have it rehearsed. 
He will understand and appreciate the truth of it 
before he gets through life, and it is a great pity 
for him not to have at least a little appreciation 
of it near the beginning, so as to frame his initial 
years in consonance with it. The point at which 
so many of our young men go wrong is in think- 
ing that qualification for life consists in being 
able to do certain particular things. This would 
be like saying, for example, that a man is physi- 
cally equipped because, as the result of a good 
deal of specialized gymnastic training, he has 
learned to stand on his head or to walk on his 
hands. Such tricks may be both interesting and 
remunerative, but the ability to perform them 
tells us nothing as to the athlete's general physi- 
cal condition, or as to his bodily ability to sustain 
the pressure that will be put upon him, or to 
render the service that will be required of him. 
The first thing that a man needs as an animal is 
to have a body that is all-round healthy, and as 
much of it as possible. Everybody understands 
that, but there are a great many who are not 
understanding that a similarly thorough and har- 
monious accumulation of supplies is just as much 
a necessary preliminary to large and effective 
work along personal lines. That accounts for the 
ambition that so many young men have to get at 
their life-work early, and for their anxiety to con- 



fine themselves to narrow lines of preparation. 
Such a mode of procedure will doubtless qualify 
them to perform certain intellectual, artistic, or 
mechanical tricks, and to perform them cleverly 
and in a manner that will have in it some promise 
of bread and butter. 



# 



BUT I have little interest in addressing myself 
to young men who have no other ambition 
than to play upon the stage of personal life the 
same role that an equilibrist plays upon a tight 
rope, or that a trick mule plays in a circus. A 
man does not begin to fulfil his functions as a 
man by any number of specific things which he 
can do as an expert. The world cares very little 
for experts, and the course of events is only in- 
finitesimally determined by them. It is not so 
much any one thing which a man can do inge- 
niously that makes him a power as it is the tre- 
mendous amount of interior capital that he has to 
do with, giving him thus a kind of imperial grasp 
upon any situation that he may happen to be 
called on to face. Young men do not realize 
that, and perhaps it is hardly to be expected that 
they should ; but they will realize it before they 
get through, and it is a terrific pity that they 
cannot so far be brought to respect and defer 
to the experimentally acquired judgment of their 



8 



elders as to save themselves the misfortune of 
regretting by and by that they had not laid at 
the bottom a foundation broad enough to carry 
all that they had the ambition to build upon it. 
Just at this point I want to reiterate a statement 
already made, that there is nothing haphazard in 
these matters. The less a young man talks about 
luck, and untowardness of circumstances, and the 
coquettishness of popular favor, and the like, the 
better for him and for the world, to which he 
owes himself. Every man will have all the power 
he earns, and the power that he has will tell, not 
because people like it or like him, but because it 
is power, and as such can keep itself erect with- 
out having a cricket put under its feet, and keep 
itself dry without having an umbrella spread over 
its head. 

# # 

PERSONAL pressure can no more be hooted 
down or voted down or argued out of exis- 
tence than can the push of the wind or the pull of 
the moon. If you weigh a ton you will exert a 
ton's pressure. It is well to emphasize this, be- 
cause in this way life loses a good deal of that 
lottery aspect with which sluggishness and pol- 
troonery are so prone to clothe it. Likewise, a 
good deal of what is said about genius is similarly 
foolish. There is probably such a thing as genius, 



although ninety-nine hundredths of it is doubtless 
the name which lazy people give to results which 
others have earned by hard work in those hours 
when the lazy people themselves were either 
sleeping or wishing they could gain it without 
toiling for it. The word is a tribute which sloth 
pays to industry in order that sloth may not have 
the general reputation of being slothful. Of the 
remaining one per cent, a considerable fraction 
is certainly a type of insanity, by which I mean 
that the majority of such men's faculties are pau- 
perized in order to the subsidizing of the minority. 
There is faculty enough in almost anybody to 
become genius if only all that faculty were lumped 
at one spot. No doubt there are geniuses in the 
technical sense of the term ; so there are physical 
giants ; but a great deal more than nine hundred 
and ninety-nine thousandths of the solid work of 
the world is done by men who measure under six 
feet, and any man marking five feet ten would 
be set down as a compound of coward and idiot 
who should offer it as the lachrymose apology for 
his own do-nothingness that he was undersized, 
and that there was no use in trying to compete 
with Goliath and the Anakims. 

The power to know and the power to feel I 
have mentioned as being the warp and the woof 
of an equipped manhood. A thought multiplied 
into a passion is the enginery of human effect. 



10 



To know a truth, and then to have our heart 
throb in warm appreciation of it and strong com- 
mitment to it, makes power— always makes 
power. Those are the two parallel railway irons, 
then, upon which the train of the young man's 
individual discipline will have to run. 

I do not care just now to amplify this point, 
except to say that truth is what creates within us 
our material of effect, and that, while it is intel- 
lect that gives us access to the truth and makes 
us master of it, it is by the agency of feeling that 
truth turns about and masters us; and it is the 
latter mastery, really, that makes us puissant. It 
is on that account that so much of what we know 
as intellectual discipline is fruitless so far as re- 
lates to filling the student with capacity for effects. 
He has learned his lesson, which, however, lies in 
him only as so much combustible material, but to 
which as yet no torch has been applied. On the 
contrary, the man whose entire capital is one of 
enthusiasm will be conspicuous for his abundance 
of torch, at the same time lacking the timber 
which the torch exists primarily to enkindle. 
• 

I AM saying nothing in this article as to the 
means by which this twinship of effect will 
best be accomplished. That will come further 
on. I shall be amply satisfied if at the close of 



II 



these paragraphs my young reader shall feel that 
" getting ready M to be a man and to do a man's 
work consists in having solid deposit made ex- 
actly at the core of his own personal life ; that 
success is not going to mean anything which he 
can cleverly append to the branches, but some- 
thing which he is going to have worked into the 
stock. Truth is the only nutriment I know of 
that will become in us the substance of manhood 
and the material of effect — truth digested till it 
has become stout fiber in our muscles and warm 
blood in our hearts. We can become an excel- 
lent human machine simply by doing things, and 
doing them so many times that the performance 
becomes automatic and unconscious; but that 
sort of dexterity is hardly even tangent to our 
main matter. The first great desideratum is not 
to train our energies of action ; it is to get them. 
It is comparatively an easy thing to conduct the 
water on to the paddles and run your mill after 
once you have captured the water-supply and 
secured it in the reservoir. If it is claimed that 
this way of handling the matter is impracticable 
and has not enough to say about the return it will 
yield in the shape of money, bread, and prefer- 
ment, I can only rejoin that it is quite as practica- 
ble as the work of laying foundation ever is ; it 
is quite as practicable as the process of making 
investment ever is. Dividends form, of course, a 



12 



more congenial theme than investments, but the 
latter of these logically takes precedence. Sowing 
still antedates reaping, and the amount sowed 
determines pretty closely the size of the harvest. 
Whether it be young men or wheat-fields, the 
interest can be depended upon to keep up with 
the capital, and empty barns in October are the 
logical sequence of empty furrows in spring. The 
young man may as well understand that there 
are no gratuities in this life, and that success is 
never reached " across lots." 



II 

THE BODY THE FOUNDATION 

OF THE MAN 



NO thorough handling of the matter with 
which we are at present concerned can 
afford either to ignore the body or to treat it with 
mere cavalier regard. There is what might be 
called an intellectual superciliousness, that prides 
itself on its disdain of what is physical, and that 
affects to maximize the personal element in our 
make-up by minimizing the dignity and authority 
of the body. The fundamental thing to be said 
about all this matter is that, so far from the 
material part of our nature being an accident, or 
even a necessary evil, it is a substantial ingredient 
of our manhood. When God wanted to make 
the best thing he knew how to make, he composed 
it of one part spirit and one part matter— one 
grain of deity to one of dust. There is nothing 
in the history of that transaction to indicate that 
13 



14 



man without body is man, any more than man 
without spirit is man. All such reference to the 
body as that it is a casket for the occupancy of 
the jewel, or a cage for the temporary retention 
of the imprisoned spirit, is sheer gratuity, and is 
like the language that the more favored classes 
sometimes use of those less favored, who forget 
that those who are at the top are so in consider- 
able degree because those who are underneath 
furnish the foundation and make the opportunity. 
Animalism is an ingrained factor, and we shall 
be a great deal more sensible and far better off 
if we accept the situation with serenity. The 
whole doctrine of the resurrection is a way that 
Scripture and the church have taken to record the 
importance they attach to the body as an inalien- 
able element of our being. 
# 

THE body is so framed in with the other ele- 
ments of our being that they will not be at 
their best unless it is at its best, which will not 
be the case except as consequence of the respect 
we show it and the dignity we accord to it. Any 
man who regards his corporeal self as a mere 
accident, and an awkward appurtenance that has 
to be temporarily endured, will consider indiffer- 
ence to its requirements as almost a religious 
duty, and physical excesses as scarcely savoring 



of the immoral. Asceticism and debauchery are 
companion branches sprung from one stalk. It 
is interesting to notice how, with characteristic 
thoroughness, Scripture comprehends the entire 
matter when it says, " Know ye not that your 
body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" The 
body is the fundamental thing in manhood ; and 
it is one of the facts that ought to arrest and fast- 
en attention that the apostle who did more than 
any other to build men up was the one who held 
the regard of his followers to the physical basis 
upon which such upbuilding could securely rest. 
My main contention is, then, that the body is 
the groundwork upon which the edifice proper 
has to be reared, and that, as in the case of 
structures in general, that which is laid at the 
bottom determines and conditions whatever is 
afterward put upon it. It is a fact to which it 
behooves every earnest reader to give heed, that, 
however far the process of mental or spiritual 
development may be carried, there is little likeli- 
hood of its escaping the limitations imposed by 
the physical premise. So that a sound body is 
the first prerequisite to a vigorous intellect, a pure 
heart, and general wealth and ennoblement of 
spirit. In manhood, as much as in house-build- 
ing, the foundation keeps asserting itself all the 
way from the first floor to the roof. The stones 
laid in the underpinning may be coarse and in- 



i6 



elegant, but, even so, each such stone perpetuates 
itself in silent echo clear up through to the finial. 
The body is in that respect like an old Stradi- 
varius violin, the ineffable sweetness of whose 
music is outcome and quotation from the coarse 
fiber of the case upon which its strings are strung. 
It is a very pleasant delusion that what we call 
the higher qualities and energies of a person 
maintain that self-centered kind of existence that 
enables them to discard and contemn all depen- 
dence upon what is lower and less refined than 
themselves, but it is a delusion that always wilts 
in an atmosphere of fact. Climb high as we like, 
our ladder will still require to rest on the ground ; 
and it is probable that the keenest intellectual 
intuition and the most delicate throb of passion 
would, if analysis could be carried so far, be dis- 
covered to have their connections with the rather 
material affair that we know as the body. 

IT is, I believe, conceded that those various 
anomalies of intellect classed under the gener- 
al term of " insanity " have their grounds in some 
abnormal condition of the physical organism. It 
is presumable that there is no such thing as 
mental derangement apart from some correlative 
derangement of the physical factor. Now, that 
which holds in cases of extreme anomaly, it is safe 



'7 

to suppose, holds as accurately and fixedly where 
the intellectual aberration is slight or even in- 
finitesimal, and that every mental idiosyncrasy is 
the reflection of some probably unsuspected de- 
rangement having its seat in the body proper. 
In all this I am seeking only to set forth in a 
way to be appreciated the delicacy and inti- 
macy of connection subsisting between what we 
are as animals and what we are as persons, the 
dependence of the latter upon the former, and the 
distinct necessity we are therefore under of mak- 
ing the body the prime and persistent object of 
regard if we have any ambition of a sort that 
looks higher than the body and transcends it. 

Not only is there a recognition of this depen- 
dence of intellect upon physical conditions, but 
considerable of what used to be known as wick- 
edness pure and simple is coming to be referred 
to the body and recognized as bodily defect or 
bodily degeneracy. Without trespassing in any 
dangerous way upon the domain of ethics, it is 
still prudent to say that there is a very true and 
serious sense in which alcoholism, for instance, 
is a disease, and in which sensuality in all its 
varieties is a good deal more matter of the body 
than it is of the heart. I am not in this apolo- 
gizing for sensuality, and am going no further 
than seems warranted by the plain interpretation 
of the seventh chapter of Romans. My only 



i8 



purpose in all these references is to have it felt 
that whatever is distinctive of man in the higher 
range of his possibilities is bound back into 
material grounds and largely limited by those 
grounds. That is true here which is true in 
architecture, that the character of the foundation 
decides both the horizontal and the vertical di- 
mensions of what can be put upon it. Wherever 
we look, delicacy in the finish has to stay itself 
upon something corporeal in the start. Camilla 
Urso and Ole Bull could melt an audience to 
tears because the wooden case upon which they 
strung the vibrating catgut was made of Alpine 
pine. The object I have in this is not to intimate 
that musical sensibility is any the less fine for 
being stirred into passion by coarse implements, 
or that a man's intellectual action or esthetic or 
religious enthusiasm means any less because de- 
pending for its support upon the foundation of 
animal body. My only concern is that those who 
are thinking about the superstructure of earnest 
intelligence and an elevated and vigorous person- 
ality should never forget the fact of such depen- 
dence, but should, with sagacious and conscien- 
tious fidelity, devote themselves to bone, flesh, 
muscle, and blood as measuring the possibilities 
of personal power which human animalism is ap- 
pointed to support. 

# # 



*9 

IF we needed any further illustration of this 
principle, it would be furnished by the familiar 
fact that. physical conditions are continually as- 
serting themselves, and sometimes very imperi- 
ously, in the complexion which the world wears 
to our eyes, and the aspect under which realities, 
particularly of the finer sort, address themselves 
to our thoughts, tastes, and consciences. Hardly 
more does the condition of the body determine 
the quality and strength of our appetite for food 
than does that same condition determine the zest 
with which we appropriate the bestowments that 
reach us from the realms of the beautiful, the true, 
and the good. The body is a kind of sleeping 
partner in every act of cognition, appreciation, 
and faith. It is an interesting fact that all of 
those to whom Christ made his revelations were 
out-of-door men — men, therefore, presumably, 
whose anatomy and physiology were not of a 
kind to interfere confusingly or becloudingly with 
their apprehension of the realities tendered to 
them. Temperament is almost as important a 
factor in opinion as is the mind itself, and tem- 
perament is an affair of the body. Any man who 
is himself in any degree the subject of tidal 
oscillation knows that his own little world is liable 
to have its day marked off from its night by a 
transition almost as sharp as that which cuts in 
two the twenty-four hours of the terrestrial day. 



20 



I am not saying that this latter is a natural or a 
necessary order of things, but that it is a common 
order, and that it is only one of the many ways 
in which mind's dependence upon body asserts 
itself. For a man to be told under such circum- 
stances that he ought to break loose from the 
body's domination would be a good deal like 
telling a man who wears blue glasses that he 
ought to mutiny against the domination of his 
spectacles and have the indigo eliminated from 
his perceptions. 

# 
# # 

IT is a little singular, moreover, that the higher 
the range which thought takes the more de- 
pendent upon physical conditions its action seems 
oftentimes to be, something as the higher a house 
is carried the more evident becomes any deviation 
which the foundation makes from the line of hori- 
zontal. Whether a man has a sanguine or a 
melancholic temperament will make little differ- 
ence with his apprehension of the multiplication 
table, but will make a world of difference with 
his appreciation of Isaiah and St. John. What we 
know as old-schoolism and new-schoolism have 
their roots neither in piety nor in mentality, but 
in physiology. It will be interesting to discover 
what effect will be produced upon doctrinal di- 
vergences by fitting out the saints at the resur- 



21 



rection with a new set of bodies. It is almost 
comical to imagine what the effect would be in 
the next world if those who are radical here 
should be furnished with conservative resurrection 
bodies and vice versa. Doctrinal contractedness 
and sour piety are principally a matter of the 
liver; they are another and more euphonious 
name for biliousness that has struck up into the 
region of doctrine and experience. 

Now, there is only one conclusion that can 
be reached from all this illustrative preliminary, 
which is that the body is the key to the entire 
situation. I do not mean that taking care of the 
body is itself the promise of intelligence, or of 
personal vigor and proportion, any more than 
any other substructure guarantees an appropriate 
superstructure ; but it is the one only thing that 
makes such educated, vigorous, and wholesome 
personality perfectly possible. Fidelity to physi- 
cal conditions is the first thing for a man to think 
of who has any ambition to be a personal success, 
and not only the first thing for him to think of, 
but the thing for him seriously to continue think- 
ing of. 

# # 

IT is, therefore, encouraging that our schools 
and colleges are making physical culture ob- 
ligatory ; and the encouragement lies less in what 



22 



such institutions have already done in the way 
of cultivating the body than it does in their mak- 
ing it part of academic confession of faith that 
a man can never altogether get over being an 
animal, that there is no inconsistency between 
intelligence and dust, and that the more a man 
wants to make of himself in the upper strata of 
human possibility the more careful he must be 
to keep in wholesome condition of repair the 
platform of tissue and blood-corpuscle, into 
which, as so much bud into so much stock, later 
unfoldings are inseparably knit. I should be 
sorry to have this interpreted as an approval of 
all or nearly all of what passes under the name 
of college athletics. It is one thing to train the 
body for the sake of the man, and it is another 
thing to train the body for the sake of the body. 
I regret that there is so much tendency among 
college authorities to shape the physical curricu- 
lum to the end of producing physical experts — 
foot-ball, base-ball, rowing-match professionals. 
That kind of thing is a craze at present, and it is 
a pity that among our college presidents, trustees, 
and professors so many have so far succumbed 
to the mania as to be willing to indorse it as a 
form of advertisement and as a drawing card. 
Venerable institutions of learning ought not in 
this way to go into the catering business. Any 
emphasis given to academic gymnastics that goes 



2 3 

beyond the point of developing a man's animal- 
ism for other purposes than to give support to 
his enlargement as a rational and moral pos- 
sibility is a perversion of the purpose of human 
discipline, and to that degree blocks the wheels 
of all proper college intention. Nevertheless, the 
real animus of the athletic tendency is whole- 
some, marks progress, and is an encouraging au- 
gury of a better breed of men. 

I have not attempted to prepare a schedule 
of hygienic rules. I am both indisposed and in- 
competent to prescribe a system of diet, exercise, 
or rest. My only purpose has been to crowd 
home to the practical regard of young men the 
truth that, whether they do or do not relish the 
idea of being fundamentally animal, that is their 
condition and is probably their destiny, and that 
how much they will be able to become over and 
above that will in very serious measure be deter- 
mined by the amount of dignity they accord to 
the animal factor, and the virtuous respect they 
show it as basis of those more distinguished 
capacities and faculties which the body is or- 
dained to sustain. 



Ill 

THE YOUNG MAN ENTERING LIFE 



A YOUNG man needs to enter life equipped 
for rough weather. However much of calm 
may prevail on land, it usually blows out at sea. 
The most serious question the novitiate can ask 
of himself is how he is going to keep from being 
a castaway. I am not using that term with any 
reference to his being lost hereafter, but with 
reference to his being wrecked here. I am not 
preaching, but only stating a commonplace, when 
I say that a man who submits to the current al- 
ways goes down-stream. Nobody ever drifts up- 
stream. Running water never stops till it gets 
to the bottom, unless something dams it. Like- 
wise, a drifting boat never stops till it reaches 
the sea, unless it founders, runs aground, or drops 
anchor. A considerable part of a young man's 
preliminary interest will, therefore, need to con- 
24 



25 

cern itself with anchorages. If he lived in a 
world where everything was fixed, and if his life 
brought him into no connection with drafts and 
currents, then he would have only to remain 
languidly and unconcernedly where he is, sub- 
limely reliant upon his own vis inertice. On the 
contrary, everything is afloat. We are all loaded 
with responsiveness and harnessed up with gravi- 
tations. Everything is magnetic needle, and 
everything else magnetic pole endlessly plucking 
at that needle. Life without this arrangement 
would be death, but life with it is all the time on 
the edge of disaster and continually getting over 
the edge. If we could decide that certain cur- 
rents should produce no pressure upon us, and if, 
then, result would wait on our decision, the prob- 
lem would be freed from a good many of its un- 
comfortable elements. But the captain at sea 
has to take things just as they come. Deciding 
not to have his boat retarded by the Gulf Stream 
when he is coming down the coast does not ex- 
pedite him, nor does a decision not to be ob- 
structed by the northeast wind when he is sailing 
up the coast. And resolutions on land are just as 
useless as they are at sea. Resolution is facing 
in a certain direction, but it is not getting there, 
and does not necessarily imply any ability to get 
there. 

*** 



26 



ONE of the most expensive and disastrous 
mistakes a young man ever makes is in 
supposing that a decision, a resolution, contains 
in itself the means of working its own execution, 
and that something besides power will suffice to 
overcome power. I am not moralizing at all, 
but simply handling one or two of the facts of 
personal life in the same blunt way in which I 
would talk about the working of a water-wheel 
or of a steam-engine. The art of living is not a 
matter of resolution, but it is a genius for playing 
off successfully favorable energies against those 
which are adverse, meeting energies with energies, 
only with energies that are a little bigger, very 
much as the engineer beats the gravity of the 
train by the push at the piston. So that the man 
who is anxious not to be taken off his feet must 
make it an important part of his equipment to get 
in the range of opposite forces that will hold him 
erect and keep him in safe water. Young men 
of parts often conclude that the principle just 
stated does not apply to themselves, for the reason 
that they are personally so weighty as to be in- 
herently equal to any emergency. Perhaps, on 
the contrary, their weightiness only aggravates 
the difficulty. Increasing the weight of a rolling 
boulder does not diminish, but accelerates, the 
speed of its descent. One needs to be a great 
man in order to be able to become a great wreck. 



27 

It requires a great deal more counter-energy to 
recover a rowboat that is sliding down the Ni- 
agara rapids than it does to recover a cockle- 
shell. The more there is in a man the more 
substance there is for untoward attractions to 
fasten themselves upon. One needs only to 
know something about the laws and forces that 
prevail in the physical world to appreciate this, 
for in these matters the physical and the personal 
kingdoms are only opposite sides of the same 
thing ; and, whether it is a man or a steamship, 
the bigger the bulk the greater the momentum 
of the drift downward. It requires no great 
amount of thinking, then, to understand that if 
we are under the pull of one set of influences, 
operating to drag us on to shallows or break- 
ers, our only refuge is in getting in under the mas- 
tery of another set, and, if possible, a stronger 
set. 

*** 



WHEN calculating the prospects of a young 
man, and the likelihood of his being able 
to go through life without being taken off his 
feet, I always want to know whether he stands 
for anything in particular. A written sentence 
may be mere words or it may mean something. 
So a young man may be only a mixture of body 



28 



and soul or he may mean something : that com- 
bination of body and soul may stand as the ex- 
pression of an idea. He may be some truth 
incarnate, so that when you meet him you feel 
that you are encountering that truth, and when 
he talks to you you have somehow the notion 
that truth is addressing you and arguing itself 
out with you. We none of us have to look far 
to find such men. There may be a certain 
stringency and aggressiveness about them some- 
times that makes them uncomfortable, a kind of 
directness about them that makes them inevitable, 
but there is no mistaking their meaning. They 
are an idea become flesh — a doctrine, a theory, 
dressed in human apparel. The feature in the 
case of interest to us just now is that a man so 
conditioned is not likely to lose his way nor to 
founder. The point is not that he has mastered 
the idea, but that the idea has mastered him and 
in that way counteracts the influences operating 
to pull him in other ways. All of that is illus- 
trated in the case of a young man in my congre- 
gation, in regard to whom his father said to me 
the other day, " John is perfectly possessed with 
the prohibition idea; I cannot tell whether he 
will make anything out of it or not, but I have 
the satisfaction of knowing that so long as that 
idea keeps its hold upon him he will never go 
astray nor get into any mischief." That gives 



2 9 



the whole philosophy of the matter in a single 

sentence. 

# 
# # 

THERE are a great many meaningless men 
in the community, and what that means is 
that, while they have the intelligence to under- 
stand an idea and the heart to feel it, yet the 
idea never gets so close to them as to have its 
reality tremendously experienced by them. We 
do not win our strength and stability by master- 
ing ideas, but by being mastered by them — held 
in their grip. A man never really knows what 
there is in him, how much he can do, or how 
much he can withstand, till he gets fairly in under 
just such governance. I am convinced that there 
is nowhere nearly the amount of difference be- 
tween people in point of personal caliber that is 
ordinarily supposed. It is not so much a differ- 
ence in personal capacities and energies as it is a 
difference in the degree in which those energies 
become packed upon one another and reduced 
to solidity. Even on a cold day one can pick 
up a sunbeam and burn a hole through white 
oak with it if the lens with which the beam is 
focused is in good order. It is second only to the 
power of Pentecost to come so close to a truth 
or to a situation as to have that situation actually 
touch us and burn its way down into the sensitive 



3° 

nerve of our being. The trouble with people, nine 
out of ten of them, is that they stand on insulators 
and watch the play of the lightning through drawn 
shutters, and never stand out and let the electric 
storm play in their own bosoms. It is by an in- 
ward experience of the storm that men can be 
held fast in the midst of the storm. Nerve varies 
inversely as the square of the distance that there 
is between us and the reality we are handling. 
# 

STILL more apparent does the working of this 
principle become when for the word " idea " 
I substitute the word " purpose." Purpose at 
once suggests the notion that the person whom 
it actuates is in motion toward an end ; and a 
person moving toward an end, like a rifle-ball 
toward a target, is less easily managed and di- 
rected than when he is standing still. Indeed, 
the more rapid its motion the more difficult it is 
to change its direction, and the less effect influ- 
ences that happen to lie along its route will have 
upon it. Now, what momentum is in the rifle- 
ball purpose is in a man : it tends to hold him 
steadily to the track he is on; and the more 
vigorous the rush of intention with which he is 
following that track, the more it will take to re- 
tard him or derail him. Hence the more intense 
and engrossing a man's purpose— if it is a pur- 



3* 

pose of good —the safer he is, and if he has no 
purpose of the kind he is not safe at all. With- 
out it he is spoil for any and every diverting in- 
fluence that may happen to light upon him, and 
of such diverting influences the air is all the time 
full. 

*** 

IT seems to me very much as though our moral 
and religious teachers are not as cognizant of 
the peculiarity of human nature in this particular 
as they ought to be and as would be much to the 
advantage of young people. I urge upon such 
ones the necessity of forsaking their evil ways 
and being good. There is an ethical flavor about 
all such mode of representation that passes easy 
muster with the conscience, but without interest- 
ing much the people to whom it is addressed and 
without doing much for them. If you appeal to 
a man to jump the Hudson River, he will listen 
to you with a show of respect if your appeal is 
cleverly put, but, nevertheless, you will not get 
him across the river. No one ever gets anywhere 
except as he avails of some means of transport. 
So, if our young people are to be drawn out from 
the midst of the clutch of small and tainted pas- 
sions and motives, it will have to be done by 
their being lassoed by the noose of a large and 
dominating intention. To have a magnificent 



32 

purpose, and to be thoroughly wedded to that 
purpose, is three quarters of salvation. It is sad 
to reflect how much motiveless insipidity there 
is among us that is steadily resolving itself into 
ethical rot, for no other reason than that it has 
never been awakened into vigor and electrified 
into effect by the touch of a supreme purpose. 
The capabilities of these people are equal to the 
capabilities of other people, but no living nerve 
of keen design perforates those capabilities in a 
way to save them from relaxing into moral pu- 
trefaction. Set over against these the cases of 
Moses seeking the emancipation of the Hebrews, 
and so monopolized by his scheme that he said 
he was willing to be blotted out of God's book 
of remembrance if his dear countrymen could not 
be delivered ; or the case of St. Paul, so devoted 
to the cause of saving his people that he declared 
he would rather be damned than not have his 
efforts succeed. How much effect would the 
small temptations, that existed in those old days 
just as plentifully and divertingly as they do in 
our days, have to swing either the prophet of 
Sinai or the apostle of Tarsus and Damascus out 
into the petty and tainted world of selfish and 
mean desire? I have not illustrated by Moses 
and St. Paul because they are Bible characters, 
but because every one knows enough of them to 
feel the cogency of the illustration. It would 



33 

have been morally impossible for either of those 
heroes of faith and of service to have become in 
any way degenerate, because they were held fast 
under the inspiration of a sublime endeavor. 

*** 

AND there is one other influence essential to 
Xjl the maintenance in a young man of an erect 
life, and that is the stimulus and governance that 
come from the personal inspirations of a life that 
is larger than his own. As already seen, we get 
a great deal from an idea and still more from a 
purpose, but real inspiration never proceeds from 
anything that is of the neuter gender, and St. 
Paul stated it in a way that the world has never 
forgotten when he said : " I know whom [not 
what, but whom] I have believed." I do not 
quote him here because the fact he was express- 
ing was a religious one, but because he states in 
so terse a way that it was personal pressure, and 
not something impersonal, that made out the 
material of his own strength and fixity. John 
Stuart Blackie uttered the same truth at a different 
level of experience when he wrote : " To have 
felt the thrill of a fervid humanity shoot through 
your veins at the touch of a Chalmers, a Macleod, 
or a Bunsen is to a young man of fine suscepti- 
bility worth more than all the wisdom of the 
Greeks, all the learning of the Germans, and all 



34 



the sagacity of the Scotch." Any young man is 
not only unfortunate, but in danger, who is not 
related to some great overshadowing soul in some- 
thing the same way in which the original apostles 
were related to the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. 
Such souls are to us in the nature of a personal 
baptism. They not only fill us, they sweeten us 
and steady us. They become life and impulse 
within us. They lift us into ranges of experience 
and possibilities of effect that are otherwise denied 
us. That was all expressed in the famous tribute 
that Garfield paid to Mark Hopkins. It is not 
what such kingly spirits say to us, nor what they 
do before us, but what by some sort of pente- 
costal process they are able to become within us, 
that constitutes the real service they render. I 
had a good many professors in college who taught 
me things, but hardly more than one that so made 
himself over to me as to leave me richer and safer 
than he found me. The others may have done 
something toward making me a mathematical or 
a linguistic expert, but there was one who was to 
me a personal inspiration, and who did for me 
and for my classmates on human ground what 
was done for Spirit-baptized disciples in the olden 
time, when they were able to think with a wisdom 
and walk with a steadfastness begotten in them 
by the powers above. 



IV 



SHALL WE SEND OUR BOY TO 
COLLEGE? 

THAT depends a great deal on the boy. It 
might not be best for him to go to college ; 
it might not be best for the community that he 
should. College can fit a man for life, and, also, 
it can unfit him. There are styles of education 
that disqualify the student for doing what he is 
competent to do, without qualifying him to do 
that which he might like to do, but for which 
he lacks, and always will lack, the prerequisites. 
Agriculturalists tell us that there are soils which, 
if left mostly to themselves, will bear a very re- 
spectable crop of a certain order, but which, if 
considerably cultivated, will neither bear a crop 
of that order nor of any other. Soil and brain 
are not so widely differenced as not to be sub- 
ject, within certain limits, to the same laws. As 
a general principle, the more a man knows the 
35 



36 

better ; but so long as the present order of things 
continues a great amount of very ordinary work 
will require to be done ; and ordinary people 
will do ordinary work better than extraordinary 
people will, and be a great deal more comfortable 
while doing it. Hordes of both sexes are enter- 
ing college for the reason that they do not enjoy 
doing commonplace things. The result is that 
commonplace things are left undone, and un- 
commonplace things fare still worse. 

• # 

AGRICULTURE is the material basis of a 
JljL nation's strength and prosperity. We could 
dispense with either lawyers, doctors, or ministers 
better than we could with farmers. Probably we 
should not quarrel so much if there were fewer 
students of the law, should not be sick so much 
if there were fewer students of medicine, and 
should not be so wicked if there were fewer 
students of theology. All of these could contrib- 
ute liberally to the ranks of the agriculturalists 
with advantage to the professions and to the grain 
and vegetable markets. I am not disparaging 
anybody; neither am I saying that it would not 
be a good thing, in itself considered, if every one, 
however material or menial his occupation, could 
receive all that the finest school or college train- 
ing could confer ; but that is not practicable at 



37 



present, and never will be till people get over 
thinking that there is a disgrace attaching to the 
doing of ordinary things. I am often called upon 
by those who are not ashamed to beg, but who 
would blow out their brains or jump into the 
North River before they would soil their hands 
by shoveling gravel. They are frequently college 
graduates, who got just enough Greek and Latin 
to think that manual labor was degrading, but 
not enough Greek and Latin to guarantee them 
against the poorhouse. They illustrate the point, 
already made, that colleges unfit men as well as 
fit them. This is one matter, then, that parents 
need to think over when considering the question 
of giving their boys a college education. 

I BELIEVE thoroughly in the college, and it 
is significant that very few college graduates 
feel otherwise. The disparagement of such 
institutions emanates, almost without exception, 
from those who have not experienced their bene- 
fits, and are not, therefore, in a situation to reach 
an intelligent judgment. It is not safe to claim, 
however, that every kind of success, even of 
legitimate success, will be promoted by a college 
training. There are two classes of result toward 
which men strive, and two sorts of problem that 
the engagements of their life will require them to 



3« 



solve. One of these classes could be illustrated 
by the money-getter. If I had a boy for whom 
it was my supreme ambition that he should be- 
come rich, I should not send him to college. So 
far from helping his prospects in that direction, 
it would probably damage them. Broad-minded- 
ness cannot be counted upon to yoke up easily 
with monetary shrewdness. Money-making is a 
trick. The easy acquisition of it is a knack. It 
involves the condensation of interest and faculty 
along a particular line, and that a narrow line. 
There is nothing to hinder a very small man 
from being a very wealthy one. Some men, 
whose names will instantly occur, probably, to 
the reader of this article, could hardly have be- 
come greater except at the expense of becoming 
poorer. 

# # 

SHREWDNESS does not imply big-minded- 
ness. I might say with a good deal of 
assurance that it implies the contrary. And 
shrewdness has more than anything else to do 
with the acquisition of gain. I am not defining 
words here, but trying to use them in the sense 
usually accepted. Shrewdness among men is a 
good deal the same thing that sharpness is among 
knives, razors, and scissors, and is less suggesti\e 
of largeness than it is of blade thinned down to 



39 

an edge. This is not disparaging the quality of 
the material. The sharpest razors can be drawn 
down only from the best steel, but nevertheless 
the reason they can cut is because there is so little 
to them at the point where they take hold. Much 
the same thing can be asserted of other experts 
as well as of the money expert. There are a 
great many things that can be best done by the 
man who does not know too much, or at least by 
the man whose intelligence is concentrated at a 
single point or along a single line. The me- 
chanic who has come to be known among us as 
the " wizard " would perhaps have been more of 
a man if he had gone to Harvard, but it would 
probably have spoiled him as a " wizard." Ge- 
nius is presumably always a species of mania, 
and liable, therefore, to become something very 
ordinary if successfully subjected to the processes 
of the asylum. They had better be kept away 
from college if the design is to make them ex- 
perts. College will be able to give them a 
character of " all-roundness " ; but a knife cannot 
be round and sharp at the same time; neither 
can a boy. It is true that there are what are 
called business colleges, where the monopolizing 
purpose is to make the students into business 
experts, money-making experts. It is unfortunate 
that such schools are called " colleges," for to the 
degree in which they fulfil their advertised pur- 



40 

pose they cease to embody the college idea. 
Such " colleges" do not aim to deepen and 
expand their students, but to sharpen them for 
business life, and perform, therefore, only the 
same part that the grindstone and the hone do 
in preparing the razor for the cutlery shop. 






THIS leads up directly to the second class of 
results toward which men strive, and for 
which any of what are called the learned pro- 
fessions would suffice as example. We are now 
on ground quite distinct from that occupied by 
the expert. We are quite out of the region of 
shrewdness, crankiness, and mania. In dealing 
with our physician, our lawyer, or our clergyman, 
we want a man with trained powers and with 
balanced powers. In that I have combined in 
a single sentence the two purposes of the college. 
The object of such an institution is not to fit a 
man for any specific occupation or calling. Col- 
lege is not a grindstone nor a whetstone. In its 
true intention it stands in the same relation to 
mind that the gymnasium does to body. Men 
do not practise in a gymnasium in order that 
they may learn how to perform any specific 
variety of physical labor, but in order that they 
may be in muscular condition to do anything 
that may come to them to be done, or, still better, 



4i 

that their body may be at its completest and its 
best. So, if we are going to do large, intelligent 
work, the prime condition is the possession of an 
intellect trained and stocked in the same gen- 
eral and comprehensive way. College training is 
simply the process of intellectually getting ready ; 
not getting ready for this, that, or the other 
specific mental service, but simply getting ready 
—planting down a broad foundation of prelimi- 
nary, big enough to support any breadth or height 
of superstructure that there may be need or op- 
portunity to put upon it. 

There are two criticisms which ardent and 
practical young men are likely to pass upon the 
purpose of college training as thus stated, one of 
which is that it involves an infeasible expenditure 
of time. Graduates are themselves the best judges 
upon this matter. The college course and the 
requisite preparatory training cost about seven 
years of the best and most possible period of a 
man's life. There may be circumstances in the 
case that forbid such expenditure. Considera- 
tions of health, means, dependencies, may neces- 
sitate a different mode of life and a pecuniarily 
remunerative one ; but if a young man hopes to 
do a large, solid work in the world, a work in 
which intelligence of a broad kind is to play 
any considerable part, and there is no antece- 
dent obstacle in the way, he makes an irreversible 



4 2 



mistake if he considers seven years too much to 
pay for a liberal education. 

*** 

IF the practical youngster considers such an 
expenditure of ten per cent, of his lifetime 
impracticable, it needs to be said that there is 
nothing more misleading than the "practical" 
conclusions arrived at by inexperience. The time 
a man spends in getting ready is never wasted 
time. The value of a man's work is not deter- 
mined nearly as much by its quantity as by its 
quality, and quality is the correlate of preparation. 
If I may refer to myself, I commenced what may 
be called my life's work when I was thirty-three. 
Up to that time I was simply finishing the pre- 
liminaries and had no definite purpose for the fu- 
ture. More men scrimp the effects of their life by 
beginning too early than by beginning too late. 
If they die young it makes little difference how 
much time they spend in apprenticeship, and if 
they live to a ripe age it makes a great deal of 
difference. It is rather a suggestive fact that nine 
tenths of our Lord's life he spent in preparation. 
# 

I AM only dealing just now with the general 
proposition that because it takes seven years 
to reach the end of a college course is no kind 



43 

of reason at all why a man should not take a 
college course. So far from its not being prac- 
tical, it is the most severely practical thing he can 
do, just as the most practical thing an architect 
can first do in putting up a building is, not to 
build, but to excavate ; and the higher he expects 
to build up the more time he will use in digging 
down. It is safe to say that ninety-five out of a 
hundred college graduates would take no excep- 
tion to my statement. 

Another criticism prompted by the utilitarian 
spirit, particularly if inexperienced, will be that 
the college occupies itself so much with what has 
no direct bearing upon the ordinary questions of 
life. To any one who has yielded himself vigor- 
ously to the discipline of the college curriculum 
such a criticism appears just about as reasonable 
as it would for a man to object to certain dishes 
placed before him at table on the ground that he 
was unable to follow each crumb and drop to the 
particular function it discharges in the anatomy 
and physiology of the body. It is a sad pity that 
our college authorities are to such a degree suc- 
cumbing to this shallow skepticism, and that they 
are so largely allowing the idea that a college is 
an institution for the comprehensive upbuilding 
of a man to be replaced by the idea that it is 
a sort of whetting-shop where dull steel can be 
ground to an edge, or a kind of cabinet shop 



44 



where unshaped timber can be worked down and 
fitted to a particular niche in the business of life. 
In this way, instead of being the fosterer of in- 
telligence pure and simple, the college is coming 
to be utilized to a considerable degree as a con- 
trivance for teaching mind to do specific things 
and play particular tricks. Still, the old idea is 
deeply rooted, and there is conservatism enough, 
I hope, to insure its maintenance. The question 
to be settled is not what particular studies will 
be the means of securing the graduate quickest 
admission to the activities of life, but what are 
the studies that are best fitted to make his mind 
distinct and vigorous in every direction, so that 
he will be soundly intelligent and equipped even 
for uncalculated emergencies. 

I can say, for myself, that those studies which 
seemed to me when in college least prolific in 
probable practical result have in the issue shown 
themselves to be just the ones that have been 
most practical and prolific in their yield. Those 
powers of mind which are the most necessary are 
in many a student the very ones that are most 
feebly present, and the ones, therefore, to which 
the most attention needs to be given rather than 
the least. A student's fondness for a particular 
branch, and his ability to appreciate in advance 
the advantages of a particular branch, suggest 
absolutely nothing as to the desirability of prose- 






45 

curing that branch. The trouble with hosts of 
people is that they want to get results without 
earning them. Young men fix their eyes upon 
those who have attained a measure of success, 
and conceive that there is a possibility of their 
attaining to the same success without squarely 
and honestly paying for it. We never obtain 
what we have not, except by the laborious exer- 
tion of what we have. There are no royal roads ; 
there are no short cuts which do not in the end 
demonstrate themselves to be the longest and 
most circuitous routes in existence. College life 
is long and laborious. It costs money, and other 
things that are still more expensive than money. 
But it is the best expedient yet devised for se- 
curing in a man that completeness of equipment 
which will enable him to win his way in the 
world, where so immense a proportion of the 
problems have to be solved by intelligence that 
is trained, balanced, and on the alert. 

In my next article (in response to a request 
received from one of my readers) I want to say 
something as to the means by which one who for 
any reason is not able to go to college can best 
make up to himself the loss which he thereby 
suffers. 



V 

SUBSTITUTES FOR A COLLEGE 
TRAINING 

OUR previous article stated some of the ad- 
vantages of a college training. Some go 
to college who would have been better off at 
home. Some, who would have been benefited 
by such discipline, have the opportunity closed 
against them by circumstances that are beyond 
their control. To many of the latter the depri- 
vation is a bitter disappointment, and the earnest- 
ness of their own temperament and purpose of 
life puts them upon inquiring how the loss which 
they thus sustain can, in a measure, be made up 
to them by some sort of substitute for college 
training. The aim of the present chapter is to 
answer, as far as possible, this inquiry. 



T 



HE first thing of which we need to remind 
ourselves is that the particular studies which 
46 



47 

are taken up in college are not prosecuted for 
their own sake, but for the sake of the interior 
discipline which their prosecution is presumed to 
afford. Let me cite, as example, the Greek and 
Latin languages. If, now, those languages were 
studied in order that upon graduation the student 
might be in a condition to read classic authors 
with facility and intelligence, it would be difficult 
to solve my inquirer's perplexity. Nothing but 
the study of Greek and Latin will acquaint men 
with Greek and Latin, and there is nothing that 
will perfectly take the place of a college as an 
expedient for pursuing those studies. The instant 
it is allowed that the final object of a college 
course is to acquaint students with the branches 
taught in that course, there is no longer anything 
that can be offered as a substitute for such a 
course. But that, as I have already attempted 
to show, is not the object of the college. A 
student may think it is before he goes, but he 
understands better after he has been out a few 
years. I studied Greek faithfully when I was in 
college and read considerable of Homer, but I 
do not suppose I could read a line of him to-day 
without a grammar and a dictionary. If anybody 
says I ought to be ashamed of it, all I can reply 
is that I am not ashamed of it at all. When a 
traveler comes to a river he looks about to find 
a bridge by which he can cross it, and when he 



4 8 



gets to the other end of the bridge he leaves it 
for the next man, without it ever occurring to 
him to take it along with him. So, when a 
mountaineer is scaling a sharp spur, and finds a 
ladder spiked in for the convenience of climbers, 
he puts his foot upon it, scrambles up over it, and 
then leaves it behind him, never expecting to 
encounter any one who is so much of a fool as 
to rebuke him for not having trundled the ladder 
up with him, and for not having capped the 
summit with all his mountaineering paraphernalia. 
What I mean by this is that Greek, Latin, physics, 
and mathematics are primarily not the goal of 
pursuit, but are the bridges, ladders, and other 
apparatus of locomotion by which the goal is to 
be reached; so that, whether we do or do not 
know how to read Plato and Livy six years after 
we are out of college, or how to analyze flowers 
and calculate eclipses, we are still at the apex if 
we are possessed of the mental keenness and 
vigor which it is the supreme office of those 
studies to produce. 

# • 

UNDERSTANDING, then, that mental keen- 
ness and vigor are the final objects proper 
to be aimed at by a college course, it becomes a 
very natural and suitable question to ask whether 
those objects are not such that other than college 






49 

means will suffice to compass them. Because a 
gymnasium affords opportunity for systematized 
bodily training hardly to be obtained otherwise, 
it does not follow that a gymnasium is necessary 
to health, and that there are no other means of 
physical culture that will not answer every essen- 
tial purpose. If health depended on the swinging 
of dumb-bells, or the ability to vault, or to exploit 
parallel bars, then a gymnasium would be an 
indispensable, and all idea of substituting for 
it a vagary ; but what one man gets in a gymna- 
sium another may get just as well in a rowboat, 
or on a mountain climb or a bicycle, or even in 
the common exertion of every-day exercise. The 
question in physical matters is not how the dis- 
cipline comes, but whether it comes. So it is in 
the matter we are considering now. When a 
man has reached the age of thirty, the question 
to ask is how much intellectual vigor he is pos- 
sessed of, not how he obtained it. 

I can take another step forward now and say 
that everything that taxes the mind is in the 
nature of mental discipline. In every department 
of acquisition we make progress by trying to be 
to the utmost the thing that we already are. If 
our object is to lengthen the reach of our vision, 
we do it by requiring our eyes from time to time 
to form a distinct image of objects so far re- 
moved that it is done only by a little exertion. 



50 



That is why sailors have a better eye for distant 
objects than a landsman has. The gymnast who 
is intent upon adding to his muscle raises a 
dumb-bell that demands of him distinct outlay of 
effort. He becomes stronger by being as strong 
as he can with the fund of strength he already 
possesses. The same principle, familiarized to 
us by the more commonplace acquirements of 
life, is really the fundamental factor in all pro- 
cesses of mental discipline. The mind also gains 
in vigor by the taxed exercise of its vigor. As 
soon as any particular variety of mental exercise 
has been practised so long that it ceases to cost 
us effort its value as a means of mental training 
has come to an end. Any employment, therefore, 
that tends to keep the intellectual powers strained 
is to a degree working the same kind of educational 
effect that is produced by training in college. 
• 

HOW much all this means has been brought 
very closely home to me by my intimate 
personal acquaintance with two communities, one 
of which is devoted to agricultural, the other to 
manufacturing, interests. One of these two is 
filled up with machines, and the men and women 
who tend them become almost as mechanical in 
their mental processes as are the machines them- 
selves. The efforts required by such employment 



Si 

may be physically exhaustive, but the intellectual 
activity involved sinks almost to the level of the 
automatic. The other town mentioned is dis- 
tinctly agricultural. It is largely in the hands of 
independent farmers, who work with their own 
hands, but who form their own plans of work, 
study the soil, observe climatic conditions, fa- 
miliarize themselves with the whole matter of the 
relation and adaptedness of crops, and are well 
at home with the requirements of the markets. 
Any man who has undertaken to be either a 
teacher or a preacher in two communities thus 
differenced in their occupations understands very 
well the unlikeness between the two in point of 
intelligence. It is not simply that it takes less 
brain to run a loom than it does to raise a crop, 
but that there is nothing in the former to strain 
the brain and stimulate it to become larger. 
Closely consistent with all of this is the increased 
attention which is coming to be paid to manual 
training, and that, too, not simply with the in- 
tention of providing the student with a means of 
livelihood, but for the purpose of the intellectual 
training which it involves. Neither a boy nor a 
man can do difficult and painstaking work with 
his hands without his energies of attention and 
thought becoming enlisted and strained, and that, 
so far forth, means education — education in the 
same sense in which college intends it, viz., the 



5 2 

knitting of the mental fiber together in closer 
compactness. Such a process will not make a 
man either a linguist or a mathematician, but if 
wisely selected and maintained will at least work 
in the direction of the results aimed at by the 
discipline of the college. 

IT will be still further in the same direction, 
and a more pronounced step in that direction, 
to say that systems of instruction by correspon- 
dence have been developed in a very remarkable 
degree during the past few years ; and while they 
do not take the place of the college, they go quite 
a way toward it. Probably almost any man who 
has an earnest purpose to equip himself for effec- 
tive service would be able to devote an hour a 
day to quiet and concentrated study. He will 
lack the stimulus that comes from the rivalries 
and personal contacts of college, but that will be 
mostly supplied by his own ambition. The col- 
lege, too, gives that carefully considered direction 
to studious endeavor such as could certainly not 
be expected from a student who was undertaking 
to work out his own course unaided and alone. 
Anything like a balanced education implies a 
system of discipline whose administration is in 
the hands of a master who thoroughly compre- 
hends that system. The great fault of private 






53 

attempts at an education is that the learner is a 
blind leader of the blind, and therefore runs great 
risk of never getting anywhere in particular. It 
is at this point that the scheme of education 
by correspondence just mentioned comes to the 
rescue. It lacks the element of direct personal 
touch between teacher and pupil, but secures the 
very important feature of intellectual governance. 
A personal friend of mine recently took up the 
study of Hebrew in this way. His report of the 
case is that, though his teacher and he were 
hundreds of miles apart, and the intercourse of 
question and answer had to be maintained entirely 
by mail, yet he considered that the progress he 
made was nearly as great and satisfactory as 
though the course had been conducted m a col- 
lege or seminary class-room. And even if he did 
not in a given time acquire the same amount of 
Hebrew that might have been possible in the 
ordinary method of personal instruction, yet it is 
presumable that the intellectual tax upon him was 
just as severe, if not more so, and that, after all, 
as already intimated, is the chief desideratum. 
If a man cannot go to college, the college can in 
this way, in a very wide and true sense of the 
term, come to him. This is not the place to go 
into the details of this matter of correspondence 
schools. My only object in this allusion has 
been to show that to any man who has a little 



54 



time, a fair amount of brain, and a large store of 
energy and patience, there are the means at hand, 
without much pecuniary expense, of securing a 
near equivalent of the mental discipline obtainable 
in college, and an interior equipment, therefore, 
qualifying for good and effective service. The 
man who fails of doing large work in the world 
because he has not spent four years in Harvard 
or Yale, Amherst or Columbia, has himself to 
blame for it. 

# # 

IT involves no abandonment of practical ground 
to say that an additional means of mental 
discipline is involved in the laborious contempla- 
tion of the great truths of our Christian religion. 
In making this reference I am not speaking at 
all in the interests either of morality or of piety. 
The position here assumed simply tallies with the 
statement attributed to Rufus Choate that he 
recommended to his law students a familiarity 
with the Westminster Assembly's Shorter Cate- 
chism. No one will imagine that his suggestion 
was made in the interests of evangelization ; 
neither is mine. The authors of that catechism 
may have said a great deal more than they know, 
but the lines of thought which they laid down 
feel their way out into the vastnesses of religious 
reality in such a way that no mind can follow 



55 

them, or even attempt to follow them, without 
feeling itself to be developing intellectual nerve 
and robustness in the process. It is a great thing 
to think about large matters, even if the accuracy 
of the thinking cannot be absolutely guaranteed, 
for it creates intellectual width and strains the 
mental tissues in a way that makes over to them 
push and resolution. It may be well said of the 
hardy intelligence of the Scotch that it is due to 
generations of oatmeal and Calvinism. In read- 
ing recently the biography of a prominent states- 
man, it was interesting to observe that his training 
was conducted along distinctly biblical lines, and 
that, while he did not have the advantage of a 
college education, the loss was in no small mea- 
sure made up to him by the thoroughness with 
which he was taught in the truths of our religion. 
Contact with great truths, whether of the astro- 
nomical or of the theological heavens, gets the 
mind into a large way of working, and the stuff 
that is in an idea becomes stuff in the mental 
caliber of the mind that digests and assimilates 
that idea. It is easy and rather good form to 
depreciate the tough indoctrination that used to 
be administered on Sunday to the olden congre- 
gations of New England ; but a good deal of 
New England sturdiness of thought was built out 
of exactly that tough indoctrination, and to-day 
there would be less mushiness in what laymen 



56 

think six days in the week if there were more 
sinew in what we preachers teach them the other 
one day. 

# • 

ONLY sufficient space remains to me to say 
that there is a certain keenness and vigor 
of discipline that can come to a man only as he 
lives out in the midst of things and becomes him- 
self a part of the world and of the events with 
which the world is so solidly packed. Those to 
whom my words are particularly addressed are 
young men who are anxious to make themselves 
felt in the world, and to such it needs to be said 
that we best learn how to do by doing. A sense 
of opportunity, a feeling of being a part, even 
a minute part, of the machinery by which the 
threads of current event are being woven in, 
works upon us with the power of a fine discipline 
and a strong inspiration. The solidity of the 
burden that is carried helps to solidify the man 
who carries it. Problems tumble easily apart in 
the field that refuse to give up their secret in the 
study or even in the closet. Reality is what 
educates us, and reality never comes so close to 
us, with all its powers of discipline, as when we 
encounter it in action. In books we find truth 
in black and white, but in the onrush of event 
we see truth at work ; and it is only when truth 



_57 

is busy, and when we are ourselves personally 
mixed up in its activities, that we learn to know 
of how much we are capable, or win the power 
by which those capabilities can be made over 
into effect. Let no young man, then, of spirit 
and purpose be dismayed by his inability to attend 
either college or university. Life is itself the 
oldest and best-endowed university in the world, 
and will guarantee to its pupils all in the way of 
vigor, keenness, and grasp that they have in them 
the grace and persistency to acquire. 



VI 



A YOUNG MAN'S RELIGIOUS LIFE 



MY attempt in these articles is to bring to- 
gether as many matters as I can that bear 
upon a young man's life practically. Religion it 
will be my purpose to discuss in pursuance of the 
same utilitarian idea. I recommend to a young 
man to take good care of his body because it 
pays. I recommend to him to go to school or 
to college because it pays. I recommend to him 
to interest himself in religion because it pays, 
because it helps to make actual in him that which 
is possible, and puts him in the way of accom- 
plishing here upon the earth the true purposes of 
his being. It seems to me well to antagonize 
thus at the start any such idea as that religion 
is one of the dispensables, or that it occupies 
much the same position in our personal belong- 
ings that bric-&-brac does in household furnish- 
58 



59 



ings— a commodity that it is well enough to be 
possessed of, but that stands in no immediate re- 
lation to the substantial necessities of every-day 
life. 



IN anything like a complete handling of this 
question, the first thing to be stated is that 
man is by nature a religious being. He is a re- 
ligious being in the same sense in which it may 
be said of him that he is an intellectual being or 
an esthetic being. This is not affirming of him 
that he is instinctively good or instinctively pious, 
but that he is endowed by birth with impulses 
that respond to the presentation of the divine idea. 
Just as it is true that a man enjoys music because 
he is naturally endowed with sensibilities that 
music appeals to and excites, exactly so man is 
religiously affected because natively endowed 
with sensibilities that are touched by suggestions 
and manifestations of God. They are not the 
product of education, for they precede education, 
and unless they did precede it, it would be as 
impossible to produce in a child a religious ap- 
preciation as it would be impossible without a 
prior musical instinct to create in a child anything 
like musical appreciation. This, then, gives us a 
starting-point. It authenticates religion by show- 
ing that its foundations are laid in human nature, 



6o 



and that to be unreligious is to that extent a 
denial of our personal constitution. 

# 

RELIGION, as so understood, carries with it a 
. sense of divine things and a certain appre- 
ciation of God's righteous authority and gover- 
nance. There is as much difference among men 
in the distinctness of their religious discernments 
as in that of their intellectual or artistic discern- 
ments. John and Charles may differ in the 
facility with which they appreciate the cardinal 
principles of arithmetic, and there may be the 
same amount of difference in the readiness with 
which they lay hold upon the class of realities 
covered by the term "religion." It would be 
stupid in a student to conclude that, because 
astronomy means less to him than it does to his 
classmate, therefore astronomy is a myth, and the 
finer the astronomer the greater the fool. Young 
men reason in that way about religion, and with 
no less of discredit to their sagacity. 

Religion, as I have just intimated, carries with 
it a sense of God's active presence in the affairs 
of nature and history, and a certain appreciation 
of his righteous authority and governance. I 
mention these particulars because of their direct 
and practical bearing upon the tone of a man's 
mind and the quality of his life ; for, as stated 



6i 



at the outset, it is only with religion as a practi- 
cal and concrete affair that we have at present 
to do. The sense of God's working presence in 
nature renders material service by affording the 
foundation back to which a man's thoughts, when 
hard pressed and wearied, can easily retreat. It 
works in us solidity of conviction by uncovering 
to us a basis of infinite intelligence down upon 
which everything rests. For instance, in the 
study of the heavens it recruits our minds from 
the tiring quest of astronomic details and lets us 
feel the support of a mind older and wider than 
the heavens, down into which all such details 
enter as ground of permanence and coherency. 
And between constructing a godless science and 
a science religiously architectured there is all the 
difference in its effect upon the personal quality 
and fiber of the builder that there is between 
erecting castles in the air and founding them 
upon the ground. 

THE religious sense exerts, also, just as direct 
a pressure in all the mind's dealing with the 
progress of event and the course and destiny of 
history. Without a recognized God of history 
there is no rational inducement for laboring to 
improve the general condition. A man goes 
aboard a boat on the Mississippi at Cairo because 



62 



he supposes that that river will conduct him to 
the sea. All our encouragement in enterprises 
of amelioration lies in the fact of our confidence 
that the threads of human endeavor are tied in a 
hard knot of divine intention. If I may be per- 
mitted to speak for myself, I will say that I would 
not have taken the first step toward overthrowing 
the Tammany government in New York city if 
I had not believed in God and in his intended 
power to make man's efforts available for benefi- 
cent and divine results. I suppose I have heard 
it said a hundred times during the past four years 
that the only men who can be counted upon to 
stand by the cause of civic regeneration unflinch- 
ingly and untiringly to the end are the men with 
religious convictions and religious faith. My 
object in referring to this is to substantiate the 
position, already taken, that religion is not at all 
one of those things in regard to which it can be 
said that it is merely a question of taste. It is 
an essential. 

# # 

ALL of this denotes, if possible, still more 
- when it is carried over into the field of God's 
righteous authority and governance. Right needs 
to mean all that a belief in God can make it mean 
before a man can be permanently trusted to do 
right. The ten commandments never would have 



J3_ 

proved so great a deterrent against criminality 
had not the opinion prevailed that in some way 
or other they were the expression of the divine 
will. It may be otherwise with angels, but with 
men some other motive for right-doing has to be 
adduced than the mere fact that it is right to do 
right. I may be honest because it pays to be 
honest, or because in the neighborhood where I 
happen to live the majority are honest people, or 
because I have been taught to be honest and can- 
not easily break with the habit ; but if I should 
make up my mind in any given instance that 
dishonesty would pay better, or if I should mi- 
grate into a community where it was popular to 
steal, or if, notwithstanding my habit of honesty, 
the apparent advantage of theft should be strong 
enough to overcome my habit of letting other 
people's goods alone, I should steal, and I should 
be a fool not to, provided I had no religious 
conviction that the law against theft was some- 
thing more than a human conventionalism. A 
man may lose his moral convictions, and still the 
moral training he has had may suffice temporarily 
to restrain him from plunging into an immoral 
life ; but the time is exceedingly likely to come 
when passion of some kind will prove more than 
a match for the inertia of ethical training, and 
then he will fall. He may still have a kind of 
instinctive respect for what is right, but not a 



64 



respect with capital enough in it for him to bank 
upon after once there has died in him the con- 
viction that the right is an eternal reality, in some 
intimate way bound up with the being and per- 
sonality of God. 

# • 

NOW in all of this nothing has been said about 
creeds. That is not because there can be 
such a thing as a religious life without a creed, 
but because the creed itself constitutes no essen- 
tial ingredient of the religious life. Creed is out- 
growth, not ingrowth. What is intended by this 
can be explained by saying that a man will hardly 
walk abroad in a world illuminated by the sun 
without having some sort of conception of the 
sun, from which the illumination comes. That 
conception of his may not enable him to see any 
better, and yet, whether it does or does not, the 
conception will almost necessarily shape itself 
from the experience which he has of the sun's 
illuminating power. Or I might illustrate in 
another way by saying that a man cannot be in 
the exercise of bodily powers for any considerable 
time without having some notion of the working 
and relation of those powers. He may not have 
studied physiology, but a certain style of physi- 
ology will have developed itself in his own mind 
as the outcome of his own physical experience. 



65 

And, however advantageous it may be to him in 
certain ways to have an accurate and thorough 
knowledge of the parts that compose his body 
and of the machinery of his body, yet by far the 
most important thing for him is that he be him- 
self thoroughly alive and in the healthy exercise 
of all the functions that combine to compose his 
body. 

# # 

IN anything like a genuine religious life creeds 
are an accident, not an essential. The main 
matter has to do with each man's own personal 
and independent responsiveness to divine idea 
and experience of divine influence, and, with that 
secured, secondary interests can be in a large 
measure left to care for themselves. All the 
church creeds in existence began in experience, 
and were not formed into words, probably, till 
experience began to cool, just as it rarely occurs 
to any one to anatomize the human body till the 
life is well out of it. It was not till the enthu- 
siasm of the early church had somewhat abated 
that men began to substitute doctrinal paragraphs 
for personal love to God and loyalty to his ser- 
vice. This is not said with any intention of 
denying that every religion will have its form of 
faith, but it is not religion for any man to assent 
to a credal form, except as that form expresses 

5 



66 



what he personally believes and is the outcome 
of what he personally experiences. 

I HAVE taken pains in all this discussion to 
keep my feet firmly planted on the essentials 
of the matter, not only because that is the only 
method of treatment commensurate with the dig- 
nity of the subject, but also because it obviates 
the necessity of dwelling upon certain subordi- 
nate questions that are always likely to intrude. 
One of these questions has to do with the matter 
of church-going. Things are quite different from 
what they were in the old days and in the small 
country towns, where attending church on Sun- 
day, and perhaps going to the prayer-meeting in 
the middle of the week, came the nearest to dis- 
sipation of anything that the humdrum of ordinary 
life had to offer. Under those circumstances the 
Sabbath services were considerably in the nature 
of a relaxation. They made a break with the 
prevailing monotony, and were usually welcomed, 
at least by the older members of the family. Life 
now, however, is a good deal more intense than 
it used to be, the conditions under which work is 
done less natural ; even the circumstances of our 
abiding-place, particularly in the cities and larger 
towns, into which population is so rapidly con- 
densing, more straitened and wearisome. Add 



67 

to this that, whereas the church used to be almost 
the only opportunity for obtaining anything like 
intellectual stimulus, the whole week now is 
crowded with such opportunities ; lectures, maga- 
zines, and newspapers are almost a gratuity, and, 
so far as the latter are concerned, on no day so 
abundantly as on the Sabbath. To Sunday news- 
papers undoubtedly is chargeable a very consider- 
able amount of current church absenteeism. 

IN dealing with young men in their relation to 
church-going, all this changed situation re- 
quires to be frankly faced. I cannot do justly 
by them unless I can put myself in their places 
and appreciate with them the altered conditions. 
I meet them, then, on their own ground, and, 
without any disposition to belittle such reasons 
for absenting themselves from church as they 
may adduce, I nevertheless say to them, frankly 
and confidently, that abstinence from the place 
of public worship is for them a mistake, and that 
they are thereby suffering a loss that cannot easily 
be made up to them. I have already shown that 
the religious is an ingredient in our constitution, 
and that we are by nature gifted with certain 
tendencies whose strengthening and enlargement 
mean the development within us of religious fiber 
and the establishment within us of religious 



68 



character. Now, I know of no means — with the 
single exception of parental precept and contact 
— by which these tendencies are so likely to be 
addressed and moved upon with effect as the 
associations, influences, and services that combine 
in the house of God. I am assuming— which, to 
be sure, is not always the case— that the pulpit 
so shapes the service as to make it a steady and 
intelligent appeal to the religious sensibilities. 
The pulpit can stupidly allow the music of the 
sanctuary to be of a character fitted only to amuse 
the fancy, and the result will probably be that 
music-lovers will go where the renderings of more 
talented performers will please the fancy more. 
Or the same pulpit can even more stupidly allow 
the preaching to take the shape of a disquisition 
or of a doctrinal discussion, and those who have 
a taste for that kind of thing will be excusable if 
they prefer for the purpose the paragraphs of a 
professional essayist or the syllogisms of a theo- 
logical expert. But the peculiar province of the 
preacher is to make hymns, prayers, and sermon 
bear in tender directness upon that spot within 
us where we keep our sense of the unseen and 
the divine ; and from a service so shaped and so 
inspired a young man with religious possibilities 
in him cannot afford to absent himself. He is 
by the means drying up by innutrition those fac- 



69 

ulties of experience and power that are the dis- 
tinction of our humanity, and is, in all likelihood, 
hiding in the napkin of disuse that talent of 
tender intimacy with the divine that makes it 
most worth his while to be a man. 



VII 
SELECTING A CAREER 



IT is unfortunate that our most important de- 
cisions have to be made at a time when we 
are least qualified to make them. Almost any 
man could be a success if, in laying out the plan 
of his life, he could make use of the experience 
that will be his by the time his life is finished. 
A man needs to live once in order to know how 
to live. Mistakes make good building material, 
but they take time. No man learns anything 
except by experience, and that experience must 
be his own. 

Next to the matter of selecting a wife, — which 
in the majority of cases is little more than a leap 
in the dark, — the most important problem which 
a young man has to confront is that of deciding 
upon his trade, business, or profession. It is a 
matter in regard to which he cannot afford to 
7o 



7* 

blunder, but in regard to which the probabilities 
are that he will blunder. Such a decision implies 
that the young man knows himself and that he 
knows the world, neither of which is the case. 
Success in matters of this sort is primarily an 
affair of adaptation, but how can there be adap- 
tation when the man has only a sophomoric 
knowledge of himself, and no more than an 
amateurish understanding of the field to which 
he is proposing to adjust himself ? 

#* # 

INASMUCH, then, as the difficulty of selecting 
a career is occasioned largely by one's igno- 
rance of himself and of the conditions under which 
his work is to be done, it is important that the 
decision be deferred to the latest possible date. 
The case will very often be that bread-and-butter 
necessities will forbid postponement, and delibera- 
tion and option be peremptorily excluded. Such 
cases will, however, be no refutation of the prin- 
ciple here insisted upon. The fact will still remain 
that the likelihood of a man's doing the best work 
that it is in him to do will be enhanced by every 
wider understanding of what the world has to 
offer in the way of opportunity, and by each 
added development within himself of power to 
meet opportunity. Undoubtedly, if we are 
doomed to have our lives run in a groove and 



72 

are destined to a career of small occupation, in 
which breadth of preparation will play no neces- 
sary part, then it may be that the earlier the 
career is selected and entered upon the better. 
As was stated in a previous article, if a man is 
going to do only small work, the work will be 
better work of its kind if the man who does it 
is kept small. The smaller the occupation the 
smaller will need to be the man, if he is to re- 
main contented and effective within the limits of 
his occupation. But there is probably no man 
who is proposing to doom himself to any such 
diminutiveness of character or of employment, 
or who will be disposed strenuously to except to 
the idea that the more completely a man is master 
of himself and the firmer the grasp he has upon the 
general situation, the greater the probability that 
the choice of his own sphere of operations will 
be a felicitous one, and one that will redound to 
the largest advantage of himself and of the world. 

# 

# * 

THE misleading and narrowing effects of a 
premature decision of the question of em- 
ployment can be illustrated in this way: I will 
suppose a man to have conceived an early fancy 
for some branch of physical science, say geology. 
As soon as that is fixed upon as a life-interest he 
will probably count as wasted time and effort any 



73 

expenditure which he may be asked to make in 
the direction of any other branch of knowledge, 
and the younger he is when this geological whim 
seizes him the greater the obstinacy with which 
he will protest against all studies which in his 
judgment have no geological bearing. And the 
embarrassment in the case is that he is not in a 
situation to judge what branches do have a geo- 
logical bearing and what branches do not. If he 
makes out his own curriculum — as he probably 
will, in these days when parents defer to their 
children, and teachers and professors stuff the 
course with optionals— he will be influenced only 
by considerations of the most superficial kind, and 
the more intense his desire to become a geologist 
the less the likelihood of his being disciplined in 
a way to make him such. The fact is, a man 
must know everything in order to know anything 
as it ought to be known. 
# 

ALMOST any young man's decision as to 
ii what he is going to do will mean the nar- 
rowing of his preparation, whereas all success 
that is fairly worthy of the name means breadth 
of preparation. A man needs to get a great 
mass of foundation under him if he is going to 
put either a high or a wide structure on the top 
of it ; and if he knows too soon exactly what it 



74 



is he is going to do, that mass of foundation will 
not be forthcoming. In all cases where it is 
possible it is a great deal better for a man to get 
the knowledge first, and then let that decide what 
the vocation shall be, than to decide the vocation 
first, and let that determine what sort of know- 
ledge he shall accumulate. 

If a man is in earnest to do the best that is in 
him, it will be much to his advantage to get over 
the feeling that there is any hurry about actually 
settling down to his life-work. I used sometimes 
to wonder along what particular line my energies 
would be employed, but I had been for a number 
of years out of college before things took any 
definite shape, and although I am in the ministry, 
I never decided to go into the ministry ; I rather 
drifted there than decided to go there. I appre- 
ciate how imperfectly qualified I am for the work 
I am doing in that capacity, but understand very 
well how vastly more imperfect my qualifications 
would have been had I entered college with the 
ministry distinctly in view and then narrowed all 
my equipment and engagement to that one par- 
ticular end. There are circumstances where the 
policy here recommended would not be practi- 
cable, but at the same time it is a great deal wiser 
to drift, and to do almost anything that offers as 
a temporary arrangement, than to make up one's 
mind finally and irretrievably to an employment 



75 



that may possibly be a misfit, and that will in- 
volve, therefore, a certain amount of failure. We 
can safely depend upon it that in the case of a 
man who has a strenuous purpose there is a cer- 
tain gravitating tendency between him and the 
work he is best fitted to do, and if that gravitating 
tendency is not hurried too much it will assert 
itself, and the man, without any excessively pain- 
ful searchings of heart, will find himself where he 
belongs. Along this line the only safe decisions 
are the decisions that shape themselves and that 
we settle into without being very distinctly con- 
scious at any time that a conclusion is being 
reached. 

*** 

A NY man is unfortunate who devotes himself 
il to an occupation that is vetoed by his own 
tastes and preferences. The scriptural injunction, 
" Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily," is one to be 
respected quite independently of the moral con- 
sideration that was weighed by St. Paul when he 
wrote it. What a man does not do heartily he 
never quite does, which is to say, what a man 
does not do with his heart he never quite does. 
There are touches of excellence to which an 
effort does not attain, except as it is the outcome 
of a certain amount of enthusiasm. Work is 
doing a thing because we have to ; play is doing 



76 

a thing because we like to ; and there is a great 
deal more of one's true self in what he does be- 
cause he likes to. Only a part, and that the 
driest part, of any workman is enlisted till his 
endeavors emanate from a spot deeper down than 
the level at which he keeps his intelligence and 
his skill, and begin to flow out from the fresher 
and juicier regions of the heart. So that in set- 
tling this question of a vocation it is a matter of 
prime importance for a young man to decide 
what that particular business or profession is into 
which he can go without a remainder, into which 
he can throw himself in unreserved investment. 

The problem I am just now considering is 
sometimes complicated by considerations of con- 
science. There are cases, known to us all prob- 
ably, where some line of occupation has been 
adopted from a sense of duty. For instance, it 
is not infrequently the case that a man enters the 
ministry because he thinks he shall never be 
happy unless he does, although not much expect- 
ing that he shall ever be happy if he does. In 
all the world there is nothing that, in order to its 
success, stands in such urgent need of being done 
heartily, and with every fiber of resource that is 
in a man, as preaching the gospel, and it is pecu- 
liarly pathetic, therefore, to see one enter upon 
such service at the slavish compulsion of an 
"ought." There is in such devotement an ele- 



77 

ment of grim heroism and frozen consecration 
that compels a certain kind of admiration, some- 
thing as we are affected by the cold glitter of an 
icicle ; but it was fire, and not frost, that baptized 
the original apostles. 

WHAT has already been said upon the matter 
of selecting a career would hardly be worth 
while did I not supplement it by one considera- 
tion of a still more earnest character. I should 
have no particular interest in advising young men 
as to the means by which they could attain the 
largest success, in the ordinary sense of that term, 
did I not assume that those to whom the advice 
is being given were motived by larger impulses 
than those of mere aggrandizement. The largest 
preliminary question that a man at the threshold 
of his adult life ever asks is not, " In what busi- 
ness can I best succeed? " but, " Am I going to 
regard my business or my profession as being 
primarily a means of mortgaging the world to 
myself, or as a means of mortgaging myself to 
the world? " We are living in a Christian era, 
and no man with a head and a heart can be true 
to that era without propounding to himself, and 
definitely answering, the question just proposed. 
It was this question precisely that our Lord 
answered in the struggle of his forty days of 



73 

temptation. Just prior to that experience it is 
related how he became for the first time distinctly 
conscious of the exceptional power which he 
possessed, and that consciousness of power led 
on immediately to the inquiry : " What am I 
going to do with that power? I can make bread 
out of stones; I can make the energies of air, 
earth, and sea the servants of my bidding ; I can 
set up again among the kingdoms of the earth 
the throne of a Cyrus or of an Alexander. I 
hold in my hands the power of God. Now what 
am I going to do with it? " That was the crisis 
in our Lord's life, the pivotal ridge, the watershed 
of the Lord's destiny. 

# # 

AND in the life of each one of us, when we 
il reach a certain stage in our history, there 
comes a moment that is the thrilling counterpart 
of that, a moment when we become strangely 
conscious of resource, and when the fibers of 
body, mind, and spirit knit themselves into a kind 
of rigid consciousness of power, and when that 
power is felt with bewildering distinctness in its 
relations to the times in which we are living and 
to the years that we are facing. And the same 
overwhelming question comes to us as came to 
Jesus when he heard God's voice, as came to 
Moses when he beheld the burning bush, as came 



79 

to Paul amid the dazzling light by Damascus: 
"What am I going to do with it all? I can 
make myself great by means of it, or I can make 
the world great by means of it. Now which? " 
It is a big question, and you cannot answer a big 
question in a small way. It strikes to the very 
root of the whole business of life, and you can- 
not possibly grasp the root by chewing the twigs 
on the branches. It is one of those crises in a 
man's life that, for success or failure, reaches clear 
out to the end of the years. The entire genius 
of the whole Christian business lies right in there. 
# 

IT is a matter of throwing one's self for all he 
is worth into the scale of the world's necessi- 
ties, and the process of choosing a career is simply 
the way in which one meets the question as to 
the particular channel along which the world's 
necessities can best be reached and supplied by 
his own personal resources. The young man who 
says, " I have given my heart to the Lord, and 
therefore I am going to study for the ministry," 
misses the entire point. There is no " therefore " 
about it. That is a pettifogging way of meeting 
a great situation. I quote from a letter that I 
received recently from a young lawyer in Ohio : 
" In my daily life about the criminal courts I 
have seen many a sad scene, and at last it has 



8o 



come to that point that I am almost decided to 
cast aside my bright future in law and enter the 
service of the Lord." I answered him that he 
was writing nonsense. What he meant by " the 
service of the Lord " was the Christian ministry, 
and that is no more a service of the Lord than 
any other reputable calling. It is not what a man 
does that makes his service Christian ; it is putting 
his career under contribution to the public weal, 
instead of mortgaging it to his own preferment, 
that makes his service Christian. There is a 
great lot of small thinking about these matters, 
and well-meaning imbecility, that works damag- 
ingly all around. My correspondent furthermore 
wrote that he had " learned to distrust the law." 
All the more reason, then, why he should stay in 
the law. We cannot improve a thing by stand- 
ing off and " distrusting" it, but by jumping in 
and converting it. If all the consecration is put 
into the ministry and all the brains into the other 
professions, neither the pulpit nor the world will 
profit. The sum and substance of all of which 
is that when a young man has come out on to the 
distinct Christian ground of putting himself under 
contribution to the public weal, the selection of 
a career best suited to himself and to the needs 
of humanity is simply a matter of studying adapta- 
tions, and deciding by what art, trade, business, 
or profession he can subserve that weal the best. 



VIII 
THE YOUNG MAN AS A CITIZEN 



CHRISTIANITY is an impulse lodged in the 
heart, but asserting itself in all the relations 
of life and in all life's activities. Whether or not 
it is becoming more intense as an interior impulse 
this is not the place to consider, but there is no 
doubt of its being held in closer and closer connec- 
tion with the transactions of the community and 
with the events of our every-day world. Medi- 
tation, worship, and orthodoxy have, through 
most of the centuries of church history, consti- 
tuted the area with -a which Christianity has con- 
fined its interests and its endeavors. It has been 
thought of as a commodity that best fulfils its 
purposes, not by mixing itself with the affairs and 
events of the world we now live in, but by isolat- 
ing itself from all such concerns and concentrating 
its ambitions upon the world we hope to live in 
6 Si 



82 



by and by. In this way its votaries have tacitly 
confessed the devil's kingship over the earth, and 
have reconciled themselves to the disgrace of 
leaving him to his own devices by transferring 
their anticipations to some new Jerusalem, where 
they hope to secure comfortable citizenship with- 
out the inconvenience of being obliged heroically 
to fight for it. What the world has commonly 
designated as " going into a nunnery or a mon- 
astery" is only a disguised form of "running to 
cover," and is a confession of indisposition or 
inability to cope with the devil on even ground. 
And the same stripe of unsanctified cowardliness 
is manifested whenever a man declines combat 
with the evil that is at work about him. 

• # 

AS already intimated, however, this way of 
JT\- looking at the situation is being gradually 
exchanged for one that is more valorous and 
wholesome. It is coming to be considered that 
candidacy for a heaven that has no Satan in it 
can best be shown by making at least the attempt 
to clear the earth of him. It is even surmised in 
some quarters that earth with the devil extermi- 
nated would be heaven, and that destroying the 
devil and his works is the only direct means of 
answer to our frequent petition, " Thy kingdom 
come." Without entering into the doctrinal 



«3 

niceties of the matter, the fact remains that 
earnest Christians are becoming increasingly 
confident that Christianity of the sterling type 
takes a very lively and devout interest in what is 
transpiring to-day on our own globe, and that the 
Christian spirit is one that asserts itself and makes 
a way for itself in all the stations in which men 
are placed. 

The sentiment which I have just mentioned as 
being on the increase is one, probably, with which 
the laity are becoming more rapidly imbued than 
the clergy. Perhaps it is because the clergy are so 
holy. A man may have his eyes so focused to the 
stars as to forget how to look at his own dooryard. 

It may not be too disrespectful to the cloth to 
say that it is safer to deal with the abstract than 
it is to deal with the concrete, and to declaim 
against sin in general or against historic sin than 
it is to pay one's homiletical respects to sin in 
particular and sin that is up to date. Besides 
that, also, it is a great deal easier for a preacher 
to address himself to a hearer when such hearer 
is thought of as being complete in himself and 
dissociated from the world and its relations, duties, 
and situations, than it is for the preacher to have 
sufficient knowledge of the world to be able to 
shape his address in a manner to take cognizance 
of all the way in which the hearer stands com- 
plicated with the world. Whatever may be the 



84 

reason for clerical backwardness, the pulpit al- 
ways has to follow when the pew gets its face 
intelligently to the front, and we may be certain 
that the times are on the way when the church 
and the promoters of the church will become a 
paramount factor not only in shaping men's re- 
ligious views, but in fixing the relation in which 
men shall stand to their own day, and in com- 
municating to the events of the times their direc- 
tion and pressure. 

What I have now stated furnishes the requisite 
groundwork for what I have to say of the Chris- 
tian obligation of citizenship. It is necessary to 
have it felt that a man's proper relation to the 
State or city and to his fellow-citizens has its 
foundations in the Christian fitness of things. 
The duties and privileges of citizenship have 
pertaining to them no flavor of option. The 
State is one particular aspect of human brother- 
hood, and cannot, therefore, be considered and 
treated according to one's own particular whim, 
any more than human brotherhood in any other 
one of its aspects can be so considered and 

treated. 

# 

A CITIZEN has no more right to be neg- 
lectful of the interests of the civic whole in 
which he is a member than a parent or child has 



85 

to be neglectful of the interests of the domestic 
whole in which he is a member. There is the 
same quality of unchristian disregard involved in 
both cases, and whether a man lets his State or 
city shift for itself, or whether he lets his family 
shift for itself, in the one instance as well as in 
the other he is false to his corporate duty and is 
a despicable shirk. 

THE doctrine just enunciated needs to be 
preached and pushed. A great deal of our 
political misery is due to the fact that men who 
are fairly faithful in most of the relations in which 
they are placed do not hesitate and are not 
ashamed to be drones and renegades in their 
relations to the town or nation that they belong 
to. They would consider themselves reprobates 
were they to allow a neighbor to suffer abuse 
without an attempt at intervention, but would see 
their entire city, with all its machinery of govern- 
ment, go to the dogs and the harpies without one 
definite effort at rescue or one distinct thought 
that such inaction was wicked and inhuman. 
Nothing will correct this evil but the creation of 
a sentiment so energetic and pervasive that decent 
people will not have the cowardly audacity to 
neglect the primary duties that pertain to them 
in their civic capacity. Citizens will attend the 

6* 



86 



primaries, register and vote when the prevalent 
sentiment of attachment to our institutions is so 
pronounced and compelling that failure to dis- 
charge the functions of a citizen will be branded 
as contemptible. Mr. Cleveland said something 
recently about the decadence of the patriotic 
spirit, and of course his utterance was greeted 
with an outburst of clamorous indignation by 
that class of mind that bases its estimate of any 
opinion, not on the merits of what is said, but 
on the personal favor or disfavor with which it 
regards the person by whom it is said. The ap- 
pearance is that when Mr. Cleveland spoke in 
the way just mentioned he had at least a measure 
of truth on his side. Patriotism has come rather 
generally to be interpreted as a willingness to 
fight and die for one's country and its institutions. 
That answers very well for a definition of pa- 
triotism during times of war, but is generally 
deficient in that it allows no room for patriotism 
in times of peace. We should consider that a 
very cheap specimen of conjugal fidelity which 
put a man upon caring for his wife and devoting 
himself to her necessities only on occasions when 
she was threatened by ruffians. A husband's 
love has its sphere of service at all times and in 
all situations. So has patriotism. If a man loves 
his country, and is true to her institutions and 
affectionately concerned for their quality and 



«7 

permanence, there will be something which he 
will be all the time doing in her behalf. Shoot- 
ing our national enemies is only a small and ac- 
cidental part of the matter. What our country 
needs most is men who will love her and, not die 
for her, but live for her while there is no shooting 
going on. 

# # 

IN what I have just stated lies the most insu- 
perable difficulty of the present situation, and 
young men who have brains enough to take the 
measure of the situation, and heart enough keenly 
to realize it, ought to have civic virtue equal to 
meeting it. The thing we have the most to fear 
is not the depravity and the criminality that are 
rampant, but the decency that is languid and the 
respectability that is indifferent, and that will go 
junketing when a State is on the edge of a crisis, 
or go fishing on a day when the city is having its 
destiny determined for it at the polls. Would 
that there could be some legislative enactment 
by which every reputable traitor of the sort could 
be denaturalized, and branded with some stigma 
of civic outlawry that should extinguish him as 
an American and cancel his kinship with Colum- 
bus, Fourth of July, and " My country, 't is of 
thee." I speak with full assurance when I say, 
for instance, in regard to the city of New York, 



88 



that there is no single moral issue capable of 
being raised in regard to its administration where 
the great preponderance of sentiment would not 
be found to be on the side of honesty as against 
corruption, provided only that sentiment were 
sufficiently resolute and alert to come forward 
and declare itself. The purpose of a campaign 
under such circumstances is not to convince 
people of what is right, but to stimulate to the 
point of action those who are already convinced. 
That was the entire scope of the rather notable 
campaign in New York city in 1894. 
* 

NEW YORK was no more virtuous in No- 
vember of 1894 than it had been in Febru- 
ary of 1892, but the course of events had enabled 
it to discover itself, to become conscious of itself, 
and in that way to develop into a working factor. 
What I would like in this connection to say to 
the young man is this : What is the use in being 
a young man, with warm blood in your veins and 
live brains in your skull, if in matters of such vast 
import as those I am now considering you have 
to be wound up every year or two years in order 
to make you strike when the hour comes around, 
and to be held over a slow fire of campaign agi- 
tation every election in order to make you hot 
enough to be passionately interested in the wel- 






89 

fare of your country or town, and speak and act 
with a fiery decision that shall help secure that 
welfare? When a man is eighty or one hundred 
years old we do not expect him to be tropically 
enthusiastic the year through, however virtuous 
he may be and however devoted to his city. We 
are prepared to keep such a one in fuel on oc- 
casion, to tend his fires, to put him in touch with 
the issues of the campaign, and to furnish him a 
carriage that will convey him to the polling-place 
on election day without too much of a jolt to his 
old bones. But the annual or biennial coddling 
of men who are on the sunny side of eighty is a 
permanent insult to young blood, and ought to 
make the juniors among us ashamed that what 
was meant to be fluid, and hot and palpitating at 
that, will so soon coagulate into tepid jelly. 

** # 

UNDOUBTEDLY the proper meeting of our 
civic obligations involves a certain expen- 
diture of time and energy. It presupposes on 
our part a degree of familiarity with public con- 
cerns and with the details of a situation that is 
constantly fluctuating. All such familiarity, along 
with the activity in which it is bound to issue, 
necessarily costs us something. We could sublet 
our responsibilities to that breed of public trick- 
sters popularly known as the politicians, to the 



9 o 



relief of our own shoulders and to the delectation 
of the tricksters; but every such evasion is a 
direct stab at the heart of our American institu- 
tions, which, if they mean anything, mean the 
personal participation of each citizen in the 
determination and the maintenance of the govern- 
ment. There is springing up among us a class 
of men, unauthorized and irresponsible, who are 
insinuatingly coaxing governmental responsibility 
into their own hands. A year or so ago there 
was held in New York city a convention com- 
posed of some hundreds of members, supposedly 
possessed, each of them, of a measure of auton- 
omy ; and yet the general and even the detailed 
results of that convention were accurately pub- 
lished in all the papers before the convention 
had transpired! And the deluded fools who 
went through the show of organizing, resolving, 
electing, and adjourning went home presumably 
congratulating themselves on the constructive 
part they were privileged to play in shaping the 
destiny of the State and nation, notwithstanding 
the fact that the same results would have been 
reached, and reached just as well and a good 
deal more economically, if, instead of the six 
hundred men gathering themselves together from 
all over the State, the one man who held the 
whip-hand over them had gathered himself to- 
gether, organized himself, resolved himself, and 



9i 

adjourned himself. Every such performance is 
solid comedy, and so solid as to be tragic. The 
point is reached where it has ceased to be funny. 
If there is any young man, appreciating the real 
intent of our institutions, familiar with the proper 
function of the people, and of every man of the 
people, as voiced in the famous dictum of Lin- 
coln, who yet can survey the scene just described 
without his heart burning within him to the point 
of outraged indignation, may God have mercy 
upon his colorless and desiccated soul. 
# 

THERE is nothing in all this present situation, 
however, that need work disheartenment. 
It is not infrequently the case that even deteriora- 
tion contains within itself the seeds of its own 
recovery. It is a lesson that has many times 
been taught in the course of history, that deca- 
dence has to reach a certain point before its 
symptoms are sufficient to arrest effective atten- 
tion. That attention is now, to all appearances, 
being arrested. Notwithstanding all the wily 
manoeuvering that is being practised by our 
political tricksters, there is growing up among 
our young men an amount of serious thinking and 
of quiet observation that contains the possibilities 
of large effect. Personally, I have never known 
the like of it. The politicians may love their 



9 2 

country for what they can wring out of it, but 
there are thousands of young men in our cities, 
and hundreds of thousands of young men in the 
country at large, who have souls as well as 
pockets, and who, if wisely directed and feli- 
citously united, can, as a very easy thing, wrest 
our institutions from the hands of the spoilers 
and devote them to the behests of the people. 



IX 
THE YOUNG MAN AT PLAY 

IT may be objected that my talks to young 
men have thus far been overtinged with seri- 
ousness. So much of the character and fruit of a 
man's after life depends on the way he starts that 
it is difficult to handle the subject thoroughly 
without giving to it a decided inflection of ear- 
nestness. The jocular treatment of a great matter 
is always an offense against both religion and 
taste. 

We should be interested to know how much of 
what we each of us do we do because we have 
to, and how much we do because we like to. 
The first of these is work ; the second, play. It 
is rather necessary to suppose that the finest order 
of activity is always that in which we act with 
the will instead of against it, and that life will 
never become quite perfect till all our exertions 
93 



94 



are put forth in gladness and unconstraint. Look- 
ing upon play in this way helps to rescue it from 
suspicion of indignity and foolishness. Play is 
far more in the order of nature than work is. It 
is in that key that the music of a child's life 
is regularly composed, and a child whose early 
years are not largely play-spell not only misses 
one of the sweetest possible experiences of life, 
but is thereby put under a blight which will by 
and by betray itself in the dried juices and faded 
colors of manhood ; and this easy, generous, and 
uncalculating swing of feeling and action, so es- 
sential to the child, never ceases to be indispen- 
sable as the years of our life go on multiplying. 
It is rarely the case that a man can retain a free 
spirit when all his actions are dominated by com- 
pulsion. Some of my readers, at any rate, will 
be interested in recalling the fact that the Bible 
has nothing to say about work till after sin had 
entered into the world. Primeval paradise is 
scripturally represented as a kind of beatific play- 
room, in which our first parents were doubtless 
more or less busy and put forth a measure of 
effort, but not effort that was a cutting across the 
grain, or that had in it the spur of requirement 
or the lash of necessity. They may have ac- 
complished as much in the way of horticulture 
before they were cast out among the thorns and 
the thistles as they did after, but it ceased to be 



95 



paradise when spontaneity was exchanged for 
compulsion. In paradise they played; out of 
paradise they drudged and perspired. Perspira- 
tion is the point at which doing a thing because 
one likes to becomes doing a thing because one 

has to. 

t 

EVERYTHING is in the nature of play and 
amusement that we do with a glad uncon- 
sciousness of effort, and it is a wise and safe end 
to pursue to let just as much of our life be so 
expended as we can consistently with the moral 
proprieties that need to be observed and the 
personal duties that require to be discharged. If 
we were morally and physically perfect, and the 
world we live in were similarly perfect, then it 
would be pleasanter and easier to do right than 
to do wrong, and no duty would be distasteful or 
burdensome. In that case the play impulse could 
always be in force, and life would be a permanent 
season of " good time." For it is not the putting 
forth of energy that makes us tired. It is the 
putting of it forth in ways that are repugnant to 
our abilities and feelings, just as water might be 
conceived of as running downhill eternally, or 
the planets be thought of as describing their 
rounds to all generations, without either the water 
or the planets suffering fatigue, and only the 



96 

attempt of water to flow uphill, or of the planets 
to make their way through an opposing medium, 
beginning to suggest the possibility of weariness. 
A little boy was once set by his father to throw 
a big pile of stones into the river. He worked 
a little while, and desisted in sheer exhaustion. 
The exhaustion was genuine. It was not simply 
that he did not want to throw any more stones, 
but that he was so tired he could not. His father 
at this point hit upon the device of proposing to 
him to see how many times out of a hundred he 
could hit a rock that was situated in mid-river. 
The exertion as thus represented to the boy was 
thoroughly congenial. It now ceased to be work 
and began to be play, a state of affairs of an 
entirely different nature. The stones were soon 
all of them in the river, with the result that the 
little fellow was not only not wearied by the fun 
of throwing in the last half, but was altogether 
recuperated and refreshed from the work he had 
done in throwing in the first half. 

# * 

A CTION we do not object to, but we none 
-1JL of us like to work, which is to say that the 
only work that is congenial to us is the work that 
we can perform without being conscious of the 
effort we put forth in doing it ; and that is only 
another way of saying that the only thing, after 



97 

all, that we like to do is to play. There is no 
fault to be found with this. It has not been 
proposed for the sake of being disproved. One 
of the prettiest utterances which Scripture any- 
where makes concerning natural things is that 
the lilies of the field do not toil. The same im- 
pression is made upon us by the energies and 
processes that appear elsewhere in nature. There 
is in it everywhere an element of apparent spor- 
tiveness. The machinery of nature never creaks 
as its wheels go around. We should never bring 
ourselves to speak of the work of the lightning, 
but only of the lightning's play. Neither the 
waves of the sea, the rush of the wind, the stirring 
of the leaves upon the trees, the flying of the 
birds in the air, nor the revolution of the stars 
creates in us the feeling that they must be grow- 
ing tired and need a vacation. 

If I have dwelt upon this aspect of the case to 
considerable length, it is because I want to cul- 
tivate an appreciation of the dignity that attaches 
to play. It is man's normal condition. Work 
is unnatural. I am not denying that, as things 
are, work, and a good deal of it, is a necessity, 
but that is because we and things are out of 
joint with ourselves and with each other. Chil- 
dren play when they are children, and they 
could play, and play all the time, after they 
had become men and women if everything were 

7 



9 8 



as it ought to be and as we expect it sometime 
will be. 

The matter of play and amusement is not, then, 
one to be considered as though it were something 
apart from the substance and real meaning of 
life, but as though it were part and parcel of a 
man's life. 

# # 

SUCH portions of time as we appropriate to 
ends of this kind are not necessarily to be 
thought of as relapses into a state of puerility, 
nor as foretastes of a condition of senility. They 
are simply breaks in the monotony of a life or- 
dinarily more or less irksome. They are seasons 
wherein the tired jade slips his harness and takes 
to the pasture, which is really his more natural 
abiding-place. It is not to be inferred from this 
that because play is our normal condition it is 
therefore an experience to be indulged in with- 
out discrimination. Because play is the absence 
of constraint, a man in his play will be himself, 
sincerely and unaffectedly. In play there is no 
affectation. If indulged in without consideration, 
its character will denote perfectly the character of 
the player. He will sink or rise in it to his true 
level. One may do very good work and commit 
himself to reputable and magnificent purposes, 
and yet in the intervals of enterprise may fall to 



99 

an exceedingly low key— be a grand worker, but 
a degraded player. That is because work is 
subject to constraint, and play (so far forth) is 
not. The only way we can exactly determine 
our own character is by noticing what it is we do 
when we are doing exactly what we want to do 
—that is, what we do when we are at play. 
There is no criterion of a man's quality so accu- 
rate as his amusements, for in them there is the 
renunciation of disguises. Our real inwardness 
discloses itself, not in what we do, but in what 
we perfectly enjoy doing. This test is rather a 
severe one, and is perhaps calculated to make the 
average man flinch. The strength of a man's 
mind cannot be estimated by the books he devotes 
himself to when he is studiously at work, but by 
those he is absorbed in when he is reading for 
the pleasure of it. 

What holds of intellectual vigor is equally ap- 
plicable in matters of moral vigor. The moralist 
may assert elevated ideals of feeling and action, 
and under the stress of his vocation as a profes- 
sional expounder of the doctrines of rectitude 
may publish on the platform or in the pulpit 
systems of behavior that will stand well up to the 
ethical standards of Epictetus, Aurelius, and even 
of Moses. If, however, when his professional 
work is done, he respites himself by an indulgence 
in literature that is equivocal, in conversation 



100 

that is off color, or in theatrical entertainment 
that is tainted, it is the pleasure he takes in his 
diversion, and not the tone he announces in his 
occupation, that will have to determine for his 
acquaintances his moral latitude and longitude. 
# 

A LL of this, also, is as true of the amateur as 
JLjl. of the professional. Mention has just been 
made of the theater. Its quality is something of 
which I cannot speak from personal knowledge. 
My acquaintance with the drama in its present 
condition is derived from statements of theater- 
goers, from newspaper criticisms, and from the 
bill-boards. I have also recently had the oppor- 
tunity to discuss the whole matter thoroughly with 
one of our most distinguished English actors, who 
has frequently made professional visits to America. 
These four authorities, each in its own way, tell 
substantially the same story, and leave upon my 
mind the distinct impression that if the American 
theater were suddenly to omit all its vicious ac- 
companiments, and to come out frankly upon the 
ground of unequivocal purity, the theater-going 
world would withdraw in impatient disgust and 
the whole business go into the hands of a receiver 
inside of a month. I want to repeat that my 
estimate is not based on any immediate personal 
knowledge of my own, but on what theatrical 



101 



people have told me. To this I would like to 
add that I have no natural prepossession as 
against the theater. The theater I believe in 
profoundly. As a means of intellectual stimulus 
and of moral uplift there is nothing, with the 
possible exception of the pulpit, that could stand 
alongside of it as an enginery of personal effect, 
provided only it would maintain itself in its 
proper character as the dramatized incarnation 
of strength. Personally, I would like at least 
once a week to get out from under the incubus 
of ordinary obligation and to yield myself up 
intellectually and emotionally to the domination 
of dramatic power. I could live with a fresher 
life and could write and speak with a more re- 
cuperated vigor, I am sure. 



#* * 



BUT from all this parenthesis we have to come 
back again to the characterization just 
quoted from the theater's own friends. It does 
not meet the point to say that a considerable 
percentage of theater-attendants are habitual 
church-goers. A great many people go to church 
because they have not the religious courage to 
stay at home. Per contra, out of the thousands 
that are in attendance upon the theater in our 
city on a given night, probably not one is there 
who is not there because he enjoys being there. 

7* 



102 



According to the testimony above cited, the 
existing theater is morally tainted, but people 
enjoy it, taint and all, and the thing they enjoy 
has to be taken as the measure of their own 
quality. This is not a plea against the theater, 
and still less is it a plea against amusements. I 
only want that it should be understood with what 
sensitiveness a man's amusements mirror his own 
moral features, and what a complete " give-away " 
we practise, therefore, whenever, in the time 
which we devote to doing just what we enjoy 
doing, we are found doing that which is flatted 
from the key of simplicity and purity. 

This is not the place either to prescribe or to 
proscribe specific amusements. It is enough to 
say that no man can afford to allow himself a 
diversion which the best that is in him can take 
exception to. It is not enough to say of such an 
amusement that there is nothing in it particularly 
evil. Deterioration grows by that which it feeds 
upon, and it takes very little coarse nutriment to 
keep it in good flesh. If we allow ourselves the 
enjoyment of what is but a little bad, it will be 
only a short time before we shall need something 
that is a shade worse in order to produce the 
same amount of enjoyment. Refined and elegant 
depravity differs in this respect in no degree from 
the coarser sort, except that its drapery disguises 
its animus and so can bring us near to the evil 



103 

one without letting us suspect what road we 
are on. 

All of this, however, nowise militates against 
the principle stated at the outset, that it is play 
rather than toil that is most germane to our true 
nature and that lies closest to the divine inten- 
tion. The care needing to be exercised as to 
the quality of our amusements must never be 
construed into a verdict against amusements in 
themselves considered. With most of us the play 
impulse stands far more in need of encourage- 
ment than it does of restriction. The proverb, 
" It is better to wear out than to rust out," is true 
in form, but false in spirit. The flowers do not 
wear out, but neither do they rust out. One 
reason why so many people are asking whether 
life is worth living is that we are teaching ourselves 
that man's chief end is to struggle and to crucify 
spontaneity on a cross of drudgery. We are not 
arguing for indolence. Indolence is as distinct 
from play as a pool is from a mountain-brook. 
But we shall be greatly disappointed in heaven 
if it does not give a great deal of opportunity 
for energy to issue in activity that takes no thought 
and is a joy to itself ; and an experience that will 
be saintly in heaven can hardly with reason be 
criticized as limp and puerile if indulged in be- 
fore we enter heaven. 



X 



THE YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE 



THE present article has to do with a delicate 
matter, and one which, therefore, needs all 
the more to be handled firmly and without evasion. 
Marriage is a man's normal condition. Plato 
has a suggestive dialogue in which he repre- 
sents the individual as having been originally 
complete in himself, but as having been sub- 
sequently slit into sections, so teaching us that 
the matrimonial impulse is simply the longing 
with which the fragments go about searching for 
their disjointed counterparts. This is probably 
more graphic than it is anatomically accurate, 
but serves its purpose in emphasizing the in- 
grainedness of the connubial impulse, and makes 
marriage an essential ingredient of life. Plato, 
however, had been anticipated by one who 
touched still closer to the marrow of the matter, 
104 






IQ 5 

and who wrote with more of authority. Almost 
the first move made in Adam's behalf was to 
supply him with the necessary consort ; and this, 
it is distinctly stated, was not done in exclusive 
regard to the necessities of Adam, but in pursu- 
ance of the wider principle that it is not good for 
man to be alone — which is, after all, but the biblical 
statement of the Platonic idea that a man is only a 
vulgar fraction till he has discovered his correlate. 
# 

THERE is no difficulty in understanding what 
nature's intention is in this matter. It de- 
notes a great deal in general that she means that 
a man should adopt a particular course, and it 
denotes a great deal more in particular that she 
means that a man should not play the game of 
life or fight the battle of life alone. Nature's 
intention is God's law, and as such it is imprudent 
to ignore it, and as such I would go further and 
say that it is criminal to disobey it. It is not 
intended by this to imply that there may not, in 
particular instances, be insuperable impediments 
to marriage which would absolve from matri- 
monial obligation. I am only trying to make 
distinct the truth that marriage is our normal 
estate, that God has legislated marriage as a law 
of life, and that the man who deals with that law 
either indifferently or contemptuously does so at 



io6 



his peril, and comes very closely upon the ground 
of disobedience to divine requirement; for it 
must always be remembered that the personal 
ability to do as we like carries with it no slightest 
guaranty of moral right to do as we like. Nature 
is a part of the unwritten word of God. 

THE idea that the marriage question is one 
that a young man can afford to treat with 
indifference would become possible only on the 
assumption that each man is in himself a finished 
unit. But each man is not in himself a finished 
unit. The individual regularly lacks certain 
qualities essential to a completed personality. 
A male taken by himself is simply an attempt, 
just as a female taken by herself is simply an 
attempt. An old bachelor is constantly sugges- 
tive of what he has just missed of becoming. So 
is an old maid. It is for this reason that we need 
to emphasize and foster the qualities which belong 
exclusively to the two sexes respectively, making 
manliness to mean the most possible, and making 
womanliness to mean the most possible, not 
dragging the distinctive qualities of either over 
upon the ground of the other. 

Every young man knows that it is just the 
thoroughness and vigor of his own distinctive and 
manly propensities that create in him the healthi- 



107 

est longing for an alliance with the opposite sex. 
This is on the principle that the larger any half 
the more conspicuous becomes its need of being 
completed by some companion half. It is on 
this account that a young man is almost never 
matrimonially drawn toward a mannish woman. 
It adds to what he already has, without supplying 
that which he lacks. This is not charging woman 
with characterlessness, but asserting that if she is 
a woman in the best sense of the term she will 
have a character of her own, distinct from that 
of man, and which man will need to draw into 
association with himself in order that, by the 
coalition of the two, there may be constituted a 
single personality that is more than either and the 
product of both. 

# # 

IT is always a question as to how much real 
use there is in counseling a young man in re- 
gard to matrimonial questions. He will probably 
not take deep interest in such matters till he 
meets his destiny, and when he does meet it 
prudential considerations will be likely to weigh 
about as much with him as logic would with a 
cyclone. However, the idea that a wife is not 
bric-a-brac, but a solid utility, is a good one to 
have planted in a young man's mind, and once 
well lodged there, it is to be hoped that it will 



io8 

exert at least a degree of pressure when the 
critical moment arrives. I do not believe there 
is a much nicer thing this side of heaven than 
falling in love, but there is nothing in that to 
prevent getting into a good, safe and intelligent 
position from which to let the " fall " come. I 
was exceedingly interested awhile ago at being 
approached by a young acquaintance of mine 
who wanted to consult me on the marriage ques- 
tion. He had completed his college course and 
was about graduating from the seminary. He 
was nothing if not sincere and conscientious. 
" And now," said he, "I suppose I ought to get 
married." There was a certain grimness in his 
way of approaching the matter that affected me 
curiously, although I had a suspicion that he was 
using his philosophy to disguise a shy shred of 
sentiment ; and the fact that he married within a 
comparatively short time lets me imagine that he 
had already been seriously exposed when he came 
to me for advice. Nevertheless, there was in his 
bearing toward the question a feature of com- 
posedness, and a disposition to take the honest 
dimensions of the situation, that augured well for 
his matrimonial future. He married the girl he 
loved, but the solid sense with which he sized up 
the real meaning of marriage prevented his mak- 
ing a fool of himself. 

• 
# # 



109 

A LARGE percentage of what in these con- 
nections is ordinarily called love is about 
as safe a guide in the choice of a companion as 
a firefly would be trustworthy illumination in the 
intricacies of a deep forest on a dark night. I 
am well aware that it is much easier to reason 
about these things in the abstract than it is to 
keep one's head cool and one's temperature regu- 
lated in a season of severe exposure ; but so much 
of the success or failure of a young man's after 
life depends on the way in which he gets matri- 
monially planted that it seems well worth while 
to preempt the ground with as much rational 
consideration as possible. If a man has accus- 
tomed himself to canvass the ground with some 
seriousness before the susceptible moment arrives, 
there will be more likelihood of his being able to 
ride the storm when it breaks, without the loss of 
ship, cargo, and crew. 

In this connection it may be apropos to say 
parenthetically that it is a great pity that fathers 
and mothers, as a rule, handle these questions 
with their sons in a manner of so little sense and 
frankness. A young man is bound to fall in love, 
— in fact, it is his duty to,— and if his parents are 
going to do anything for him they will have to 
get their work in before the blow falls. Trying 
to stamp out results after the fact is too much 
like trying to undo a powder-blast after the 



no 

fuse has been fired, which not only does not 
hinder the explosion, but is apt to maim the 
meddlers. 

For a young man to find his heart becoming 
mortgaged to some one particular young woman 
is natural and, in the best sense of the word, 
rational, and fathers and mothers make a grievous 
mistake in treating the youth, under these circum- 
stances, in a way to imply that his behavior is 
half criminal and half idiotic. There is no sin in 
it, and nothing in the world that is less laughable. 
Such dealings tend to cut the lines of confidence 
which in all matters should subsist between 
parents and children. To the youth himself, or 
young man, the matter is a very earnest one, and 
as far removed from criminality as it is from 
silliness, and anything in the parental attitude 
that tends to imply that it is either the one or the 
other is so much done toward driving the love- 
smitten fellow in upon himself, and giving him 
over to the sway of a passion that is, perhaps, 
unguided and unreasoning. It is a singular and 
lamentable fact that in the greatest two matters 
of a young man's life— religion and marriage — 
there is so generally that lack of mutual confidence 
between fathers and sons that the wisdom, ex- 
perience, and affection of the former are of no 
avail to meet the exigencies of the latter. 

*** 



Ill 



MARRIAGE, then, to a certain degree, a 
young man is to look upon from a utilita- 
rian standpoint. A good wife is so much capital. 
She makes him to be, by a kind of grace, a great 
deal more than he is by nature. She contributes 
the qualities needed in order to convert his vigor 
into a safe as well as productive efficiency. She 
introduces, for instance, into his intellectual na- 
ture that ingredient of sentiment which intellect 
requires in order to be able to do its best work. 
Heart and brain need to conspire in order to the 
attainment of the true ; and, without caring to 
assert that man is naturally heartless, any more 
than I should wish to assume that woman is by 
nature brainless, yet heart in its way is just as 
precious as brain in its way, and woman, so long 
as she is untainted by the passion of wanting to 
be a man, will be that member of the connubial 
corporation that will in particular contribute to 
the capital stock its affectional element. Some 
women may resent this, but I would like to cau- 
tion young men against cherishing matrimonial 
designs upon any woman who is likely to resent 
it. If what you want is a wife, and not merely 
a housekeeper, you must keep your eye well open 
for a warm bundle of femininity, that will be to 
you in a personal way what the fire on the hearth 
is to you in a physical way — a fund of tropical 
comfort, that will keep the stiffness out of your 



112 



thinking, the frost out of your feeling, and the 
general machinery of your life in a condition of 
pleasurable activity. 






UNFORTUNATELY for the interests of 
marriage, it is quite too imperfectly realized 
how much of what men have been able to do in 
the world has been made possible by the inau- 
dible, and very likely the invisible, cooperation 
of the wife. No analysis is, perhaps, sufficiently 
delicate to discriminate perfectly between the 
elements which the husband and the wife re- 
spectively contribute to the sum of a productive 
and successful life. The man, as being the more 
conspicuous factor, will probably be credited with 
pretty nearly all the results which are achieved, 
but he will always know, if he thinks carefully 
and considerately, and the public will be able to 
suspect, if it reads at all between the lines, that 
his best achievements contain an influential in- 
gredient foreign to his own nature, and native 
only to the less demonstrative genius of his wife. 
In this way the more perfect the marriage relation 
the more distinctly true does the scriptural dictum 
that it is not good for man to be alone show itself 
to be, and the more evident and expensive appears 
the blunder which is being made by men who 
consider marriage a matter of indifference, and 



i J 3 

who leave it to accident to decide whether they 
shall respect or ignore this original privilege and 
prime necessity of their being. 

#* * 

I CANNOT dismiss this matter without depre- 
cating the tendency, so conspicuously opera- 
tive among us, to degrade marriage to the level 
of commerce. This is not denying that there are 
material considerations that in this matter, as in 
all others, require to be respected. A poor young 
man marrying a poor young girl, with only the 
prospect that their life will become more and 
more complicated as time goes on, is a fool. I 
have had affectionate couples wait upon me to 
be married, and then ask me to trust them for the 
wedding-fee. I think that we who are clergymen 
ought to refuse to marry applicants who cannot 
show to our satisfaction that there is no likelihood 
that either they or their possible offspring will 
ever come upon the town. Nor, on the other 
hand, does my objection lie against any amount 
of contingent assets with which either or both of 
the contracting parties may chance to be en- 
dowed. My only contention is that in every 
marriage not essentially unholy the basal element 
is love, and that marriages which are " arranged " 
— marriages which mean, first of all, an affair of 
perquisites or a barter in commodities — are a 

8 



"4 

distinct infraction upon the spirit of the seventh 
commandment. The voluminous displays with 
which we know such unions to be sometimes 
celebrated only aggravate the mischief, and oper- 
ate to teach our young people in all conditions 
of life that marriage may be reduced to a species 
of traffic, differing from the dealings on the stock 
or produce exchange only in some of the details 
with which the bargain is consummated. Such 
examples are distinctly alien to the entire genius 
of the institution of marriage. 

Let me, in conclusion, express it as my most 
earnest and cordial wish in behalf of every young 
man who may read this article, that duty and 
providence may conduct him to the discovery of 
the girl that is intended for him and best fitted 
to him, and that he may have fulfilled in his own 
experience all the possibilities of comfort and 
strength which a true union is abundantly able 
to afford. 



XI 

THE YOUNG MAN ON THE FENCE 



THE caption with which I introduce my con- 
cluding letter to young men is, perhaps, 
quite as pictorial as it is rhetorical. A picture, 
however, is, as a rule, fully as good as an abstrac- 
tion culled from the dictionary, and will in the 
present instance serve much better than any one 
of the half-dozen of long-limbed polysyllables 
that I have seriously considered calling into ser- 
vice. 

When all has been said that admits of being 
said in regard to a young man's equipment for 
life, and in regard to what he ought to do and 
what he ought to eschew, it still remains a fact 
that his acquisitions and his achievements will 
depend principally on his way of looking at life 
and on the spirit with which he takes hold of life. 
He can deal with it at arm's-length, or he can 
"5 



n6 

grip it at short range. He can treat the world 
as an article of virtu to be elegantly inspected, 
or he can handle it as a practical commodity to 
thrust his hands into. He can approach it with 
an eye of half-supercilious interrogation, or he 
can come down upon it with a plump bound that 
means respect, confidence, and the will to have 
frank commerce with it. There is enough in 
almost any young fellow to get a great deal into 
life if he has the disposition to construe things 
with a degree of seriousness ; and by seriousness 
I do not mean sourness, but practical earnestness 
—the spirit, namely, that will prevent his looking 
upon the world as being little better than an ill- 
timed joke, awkward enough to make the whole 
thing uncomfortable, and ludicrous enough to 
excuse any sophisticated person from concerning 
himself much with it. 

There is a good deal of this sentiment lying 
around among young men — more in the city, I 
imagine, than in the country. There is in them 
an element of intangibleness that puts them be- 
yond the reach of approach. Their nerves they 
take care not to keep wound up, so that they never 
quite see anything or hear anything or feel any- 
thing. They are cavalier ; they have nothing 
answering to what the ordinary run of men un- 
derstand as chivalry. With such it does not pass 
as good form ever to be particularly interested, 



"7 

or to let it be supposed that, in their estimate, 
one idea is more true than any other idea, even 
if it is as much so. There has, indeed, developed 
among them a class of young men who have 
carried the nil admirari spirit to such a point of 
refinement as even to discourage in themselves 
the betrayal of symptoms of intelligence. This 
polite idiocy is largely an affectation, although 
with sufficient native genius in that direction to 
prevent the assumption from proving painful or 
exhaustive. There is, however, an advantage in 
having society sprinkled with occasional inverte- 
brates of this sort. They make admirable object- 
lessons. 

ANY one who has ever undertaken to stir 
^ public sentiment and rouse it to action 
knows, to his sorrow, what an element there is in 
a community of men who keep themselves so 
intellectually and morally chloroformed that no 
stab given at the spot where they are supposed 
to keep their mental and ethical sensibilities pro- 
duces response. A person who is instinct with 
a spirit of self-commitment one can do almost 
anything with. If he will take the lids off his 
eyes you can show him something in such a way 
that his optic nerve will be set twanging. Or if 
he will take the cotton out of his ears, you can 

8* 



n8 

make yourself audible to him and lodge with him 
some sort of an impression. But there is no way 
of bending your musket-barrel at such an angle 
as to hit the man behind the tree. A man's nerves 
must be made out of something besides yarn 
before he will be reached by a pin-prick, and 
speakers and writers learn, after very little ex- 
perience, that about nine tenths of all their 
effectiveness is a matter of the quickness or the 
numbness of the cuticle men's thoughts and con- 
sciences are incased in. It is a great deal as it 
is in naval gunnery: in computing effects you 
have to take quite as much account of the thick- 
ness of the plating as you do of the size of the 
charge. There is a great deal abroad in the air, 
and I always feel like saying to young men: 
" Get off your sheathing, and come and stand 
where the sun is shining and the wind blowing, 
and let every new impulse and latest influence 
work its own best and fullest work upon you." 

The spirit of indifferentism, of which there is 
so much, works with the power of a moral pa- 
ralysis. We know that to the degree in which 
paralysis affects the optic nerve the eye ceases to 
be able to discriminate between black and white, 
between light and darkness. The interior pa- 
ralysis of indifferentism operates in much the 
same way to confuse the vision with which we 
survey matters of truth and error, of right and 



1I 9 

wrong. There may remain still the consciousness 
of a certain difference between the two, but not 
a consciousness that draws any sharp lines be- 
tween the two. What is true does not seem to 
it to be impressively true, and what is not true 
looks to it to be truth, only, perhaps, of a little 
less pronounced character. In its estimation, 
what is wrong would be also right, could there 
only be some little change made in non-essential 

particulars. 

* 

THE quality of character I am just now deal- 
ing with is what, more than anything else, 
lies in the way of men's succeeding. The ap- 
pearance is that only a comparatively small 
number of people ever quite realize what an easy 
thing success would be if only they made effec- 
tive the means to it which they have already in 
hand. Differences among people in respect to 
efficiency are far less an affair of resources than 
they are a matter of getting those resources 
trained upon a particular point, and of getting 
that point so close to the eye and the heart that 
it shall be able to draw those energies along 
convergent lines, like a sun-glass, that will con- 
vert ordinary temperature into heat by contract- 
ing solar lines to a focus. It is worth a whole 
fortune to get well stirred up, to get all the 



120 

energies of one's being drawn out in warm in- 
tensity upon a single object. A good deal of 
the success of even a man like St. Paul is due 
to that posture of mind and of life which he ex- 
pressed when he said, "This one thing I do." 
He was wholly drawn in under the power of a 
single purpose. He was aglow with that purpose. 
Everything within him was combustible material, 
which he laid upon the crackling bonfire of that 
purpose. Success was, therefore, easy to him. 

I was much interested recently in reading a 
biographical sketch of Sir William Herschel. It 
may be a long way from Paul to Herschel, but 
in the same way that the former of the two suc- 
ceeded, — because he let himself be monopolized 
by the power of the spiritual heavens, — so the 
latter achieved an analogous success by allowing 
himself to be overwhelmed by the glory of the 
stellar heavens. It is not clear that either of 
these two would ever have been known as a 
great man if he had not given himself utterly 
away in a single self-consuming service. Either 
of these two heroes of history might have been 
politely interested in an amateurish and non- 
committal way in a thousand significant questions 
of achievement or of research, and have been 
inspired by none of them and have been a power 
in none of them. It is this same indifference to 
principles involved that keeps men from taking 



121 



distinct sides in so many of the great controversies 
that are fought out on the political arena. The 
thing about this peculiar phase of political irreso- 
lution is not that it indulges in criticism, but that 
it hangs chronically on the off side of things and 
anchors itself to negations. The most direct way 
of getting rid of error is not to vituperate it, or 
to go off in the corner and sulk over it, but to 
find something that is true and be tremendously 
committed to it. 

**# 

A GOOD many young men seem to imagine, 
also, that it shows largeness of mind and 
width of view to recognize that no party and no 
sect has the monopoly of the truth, and therefore 
mildly and generously to take a little stock in 
every party and in every creed. When I en- 
counter a man who begins by saying that he has 
never limited himself to any particular creed, for 
the reason that he considers that the truth has 
been pretty impartially distributed among all the 
creeds, I can agree with him that no sect has 
ever completely " cornered " the truth, but at the 
same time I shall instantly conclude that the 
particular person in question withholds adherence 
from any particular sect, not because he is so 
devoted to the truth that is in them all, but be- 
cause he does not much care for the truth that is 



122 



in any of them. Breadth of view is exceedingly 
often simply a euphemism for thinness and in- 
differentism of view. 






IT is undoubtedly the case that men who step 
down from the political or theological fence, 
and stand upon the ground with all their weight 
on either one side or the other of the fence, are 
not always comfortable people to get along with, 
and they are liable to keep things stirred up in a 
way that is not conducive to the mental repose 
of such as unconcernedly and a little supercili- 
ously inspect the world from the topmost rail; 
but they are the ones, nevertheless, who really 
come in under the power of the truth, and ex- 
perience the truth, and are the arch-agencies for 
truth's extension and triumph. The attitude of 
the divine mind toward all this spirit of intellectual 
dilettanteism and moral insipidity is rather graphi- 
cally expressed by the apostle in his letter to the 
Laodiceans : " I would thou wert cold or hot. 
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither 
cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." 






THIS same irresolute temper tells seriously 
against a young man's likelihood of becom- 
ing fixed and robust in his moral character and 



123 

purpose. Not much is to be expected of one 
with whom it is the acme of his moral and re- 
ligious ambition never to be anything or to do 
anything that is particularly bad. A gentleman 
once said to me, — and he is a person for whom 
I have a warm regard, and whose general life I 
believe to be considerably above the average, — 
"lam not a Christian, but I am what might be 
called a pretty tolerably decent sort of a sinner." 
He was probably balanced on the fence in such 
a way as to keep him in easy reach of a good 
time, and at the same time near enough to what 
grew on the other side to foster self-respect, save 
his reputation, and ballast his hopes of eternal 
life. The trouble with such a mental posture as 
his is that there is nothing in it to hold a man. 
There is not that in a negation sufficiently tena- 
cious for a man morally to fluke into with any 
prospect that he will not drag his anchor. So 
long as righteousness does not impress us as 
inimitably magnificent, and unrighteousness as 
unspeakably abhorrent, we shall be at any mo- 
ment on the edge of renouncing the first and 
espousing the second. We shall certainly slide 
unless we are grounded into something fixed, 
and when we slide we always slide downhill. 
The truth I am just now standing for is scriptu- 
rally illustrated by the case of a man who under- 
took to become good by the purely negative 



124 

process of trying not to be bad — the consequence 
of which was that the one devil that he expelled 
was replaced presently by seven fresh recruits, 
either one of which was a worse devil than the 
single one he had just parted with. It is well 
enough to resist the devil and to expect that he 
will flee in consequence, but unless the room he 
leaves vacant is filled up by something that is 
positively and constructively good, the emptiness 
will be a standing offer to him to return and 
move in himself and all his housekeeping appur- 
tenances. Satan is in this respect like our com- 
mon atmosphere, which always occupies every 
nook and cranny that is not otherwise preempted. 
It is a like personal irresolution which explains a 
large part of the indecision of young men upon 
religious questions. 



MORE than half of the time, when I am ap- 
proached by young inquirers anywhere be- 
tween the ages of twenty and thirty, the first 
thing I am treated to is an inventory of their 
unbeliefs. What they do not believe has nothing 
immediately to do with the case. The only 
question germane to the situation is: Is there 
anything that you do believe, and if so, what is 
it? Do you believe, for instance, that there is 
a God? That inquiry I find almost universally 



I2 5 

replied to in the affirmative. Now, then, are you 
carrying yourself in a manner, consistent with 
your belief in a divine Being? In other words, 
have you so entered into the real meaning of this 
belief of yours, and have you so put yourself 
under the power of that belief, as to be swayed 
and managed by it and to become all that it is 
qualified to make of you? The question is not, 
How long is your creed? but, How intense is it, 
and with what completeness of intellect and heart 
and life have you committed yourself to it? The 
meaning of the world, the meaning of truth, and 
the meaning of God will uncover themselves to 
you only so fast as you uncover yourself in heroic 
unreserve to the last revelation in which they 
stand waiting to commit themselves to you. 
There is as much on the earth and in the air as 
we personally put into the eye with which we do 
our beholding. The man is, indeed, the measure 
of all things, and the key with which to unlock 
the treasure-house of truth, goodness, and power 
is placed in each young man's own purity of 
vision, sincerity of purpose, and impassioned 
self-commitment. 






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